Evaluation is a critical component of continuous improvement in education. Robust evaluations enable engaged parties to determine program and intervention impact on key outcomes, identify areas for improvement, and guide future actions. Additionally, as educational systems increasingly focus on data-driven decisionmaking, evaluation becomes even…

The Mastery-Based Learning Collaborative (MBLC) is a demonstration project taking place in 47 schools across Washington to help decision makers understand what quality mastery-based (or competency-based) learning looks like, how long it takes to implement, and what resources are necessary. The schools receive funding, coaching, and professional…

Deciding whether and how to use assessments to evaluate students' social and emotional (SE) knowledge, attitudes, and skills requires the development and critical appraisal of an assessment plan. At the state, district, and school levels, education leaders and staff can benefit from reviewing best practices and using a structured format to arrive…

Education in the 21st century is awakening to a call for students who are not only proficient with academic content but who also have developed the social and emotional (SE) knowledge, attitudes, and skills that are necessary for success in college and careers. This brief refers to that combination of knowledge, attitudes, and skills as SE…

Assessing individuals' social and emotional (SE) knowledge, attitudes, and skills is a complex task. It requires careful consideration of the assessment purpose, rigor, practicality, burden, and ethics. Once you have considered these factors and have determined that you are, in fact, "Ready to Assess," you are ready to act and choose an…

What constitutes quality in early childhood settings, and how can it best be measured with today's widely used tools and promising new approaches? Find authoritative answers in this book, a must-have for high-level administrators and policymakers as more and more states adopt early childhood Quality Rating and Improvement Systems. The most…

The Council of Chief State School Officers' "Accommodations Manual: How to Select, Administer, and Evaluate the Use of Accommodations for Instruction and Assessment of Students with Disabilities" was first developed to establish guidelines for states to use for the selection, administration, and evaluation of accommodations for…

Treatment Improvement Protocols (TIPs) are developed by the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT), part of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Each TIP involves the development of topic-specific best-practice guidelines for the prevention and…

The Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory presents a primer for making educational decisions more systematic, containing a collection of (1) prescriptive guides for clarifying problems and objectives, (2) suggestions for identifying possible solutions, (3) criteria for judging solutions, (4) methods for measuring values, and (5) strategies for…

Outlines the process of evaluation of early childhood programs by administrators and teachers. Offers guidelines for formulating questions to be used in evaluation of these program dimensions: effort, process, adequacy of performance, and efficiency. (NH)

Program Level Planning, a model based upon decentralized decision making, is proposed as a method to move the planning process to the university's operational level. After describing the characteristics and steps of Program Level Planning, the problems in shifting the decision making to the local level are considered, along with the application of…

The "balanced scorecard" approach for making holistic decisions about organizational change offers a framework for analyzing four critical organizational perspectives (financial, customer, internal business, learning/innovation), using specific indicators of success that focus on the organization's vision or mission. It can be used…

This handbook offers educational supervisors specific, practical assistance in performing their main job: instructional improvement. Basic supervision principles have been drawn from scientific research; the "how-to" sections of the book have been garnered from experience. Part I, "Planning for the Supervisory Program,"…

Early retirement plans (ERPs) have recently been considered and implemented at a number of universities as a means to address their need to contain costs while simultaneously generating new ideas and energy within the institution through the revitalization of faculty ranks. This endorsement of ERPs by university administrators, however, is…

This article highlights several issues related to the collection of post-release outcome data in the evaluation of correctional education programs and identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the different methods of collecting data related to recidivism, employment/earnings, and further education/training. The use of traditional follow-up in…