A three-year research project aims to describe and analyze how school district management of educational testing and evaluation can better link these activities to instructional improvement, according to this first annual report. After chronicling the first year's activities, the authors discuss their use of case studies, interviews, and naturalistic inquiry to gather data on the district subsystems linking testing, evaluation, and instruction, the subsystems' origins and characteristics, and the effects of testing and evaluating on teachers and classroom activities. They review the literature on the subject and construct an analytical framework that includes social, professional, and district environments, educators' ideas about testing-evaluation-instruction (T-E-I) linkages, the components of T-E-I subsystems, staff performance, coordinating mechanisms, and classroom impacts. The report describes the four case studies (of a projected six) begun so far, presenting for each district historical and background information, district testing and professional development functions, linking activities and mechanisms, and classroom effects. Each case study is reexamined in terms of the analytical framework. Observations based on the case studies are then made about the framework's factors. The project questionnaire and supporting documents are appended. (RW)