Government and public focus on accountability for program outcomes, combined with practical and ethical constraints on experimental designs, make nonexperimental studies of social programs an increasingly common approach to producing information on program performance. In this paper, we compare the effectiveness of alternative nonexperimental…

This guide provides a brief overview of the issues involved in the validation process. It was developed for evaluators of adult education projects, such as 310 projects. The guide is organized in three sections. The first section discusses the rationale for validation. The second section describes the characteristics of validation models. The…

Aimed at persons planning and implementing strategies for documenting school improvements, this paper is comprised of four sections. The first section distinguishes between national problems in education and federal issues in education (a distinction considered necessary for planning evaluations and establishing priorities for federally sponsored…

The National Sex Equity Demonstration Project (NSEDP) in the Broward County Schools, Florida, was created in 1979 to provide a demonstration of sex equity teaching. The two principal thrusts of the Project were to review materials to be used by regular teachers and to demonstrate how classrooms (and a whole district) could diminish discrimination…

This two-report volume was prepared to describe approaches for evaluating individual Office of Telecommunications Policy (OTP) demonstration projects in the future and to aid demonstration project directors in project planning and development. The first report focuses on the role of planning and evaluation activities, stressing their importance in…

This paper presents an evaluation of the impact of the Career Development and Assessment Center for Librarians on the professional position of program participants (assessees) and on the managerial level librarians serving as assessors for the program. Changes over time in nonparticipant applicants (control group) and assessee groups are compared.…

Examines why an elementary school, set up as a model school promoting learning effectiveness, was not working as predicted. Concentrates on staff assessments of principal's role. (JW)

This report reports activities of the Regional Information Exchange (RIE) program under the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research's Knowledge Dissemination and Utilization Program. An overview compares the RIE program with a National Diffusion Network unit--the Joint Dissemination Review Panel, which also focuses on…

The two reports presented here describe an 18-month project intended to review and evaluate the first year's activities of the Office of Telecommunications Policy's (OTP) Telecommunications Demonstration Program for the delivery of social and health services; develop approaches for evaluating individual demonstration programs in the future;…

An evaluation of experimental distance courses offered by Swedish universities beginning in the academic year 1974-75, this study gathered data through questionnaires and interviews with teachers and administrators responsible for the courses (N=120), as well as questionnaires distributed to students at the beginning of the first term and the end…

This paper reports on a qualitative ethnographic research study on the inclusion of children with severe disabilities into a Montessori preschool program in Lawrence, Kansas. The program has served 20 children with disabilities since its inception in 1986. The program's emergent model involves a split program (utilizing a special education…

This evaluation assesses Linking Up, a demonstration program investigating the process and consequences of mentoring. The program matched seventh- and eighth-graders with adult mentors in a small, rural junior-senior high school and an urban junior-senior high school. Student participants were selected to reflect the risk levels of each school's…

This book contains four papers commissioned by the National Center on Employment Policy to review programs conducted by the Office of Policy, Evaluation, and Research in the Labor Department's Employment and Training Administration. The Council's policy statement entitled "Appraising Employment and Training Research" appears first. In…

The article describes a graduate training program at San Francisco State University that prepares early childhood special education professionals to work with children from birth to five years and their families in various settings. The evaluation plan for the interdisciplinary training program and data on program outcomes are presented.…

This report summarizes recent Cincinnati (Ohio) Public Schools efforts to develop systematic approaches to generating information for school and district administrators. The result of these efforts is a School-Based Information System (SIS) that provides the district's 57 elementary and 22 secondary schools with information in such areas as…