Structural change approaches--also known as policy and environmental changes--are becoming increasingly common in health promotion, yet our understanding of how to evaluate them is still limited. An exploratory scoping review of the literature was conducted to understand approaches and methods used to evaluate structural change interventions in…

Assessment in education occurs for different purposes -- formative, summative, diagnostic, and each with different focus on educational process, education outcomes, and developmental reasons. Researchers in Singapore have documented the existence of tensions between the entrenched high-stakes examinations and attempts to introduce new modes of…

The Center on Enhancing Early Learning Outcomes (CEELO) was asked to provide information on how other states are approaching the development and implementation of Kindergarten Entry Assessment (KEA) as part of a comprehensive assessment system. Specifically, the request asked for information about KEA measures used by other states, the processes…

Adult learning policies, like any other policies, need to be effective: they need to reach their objectives and attain the desired impacts, which should be carefully defined. Understanding the performance of policies allows policy makers to change and improve them. A growing body of research and statistics provides important insights into how…

Two decades of research have documented what now is common knowledge: no in-school factor matters more to students' educational experiences and outcomes than the effectiveness of their teacher. As a result, the national airspace is increasingly crowded with proposed reforms and initiatives designed to boost teacher performance, including new…

In March 2009, the RAND Frederick S. Pardee Center for Longer Range Global Policy and the Future Human Condition hosted a workshop called "Shaping Tomorrow Today: Near-Term Steps Towards Long-Term Goals." The workshop gave policymakers and analysts an opportunity to explore new methods and tools that can help improve long-term decisionmaking. The…

What are the relationships between policy and evaluation within state departments of education? How does policy influence what is evaluated in such settings and how does evaluation inform policymaking? Directors of evaluation in six state education agencies address these issues through detailed descriptions of their operations: Gordon Ascher,…

Reviews what is known about what assessment has accomplished in U.S. education, concluding that it has not brought about real reform. Calls for educational policy based more on deliberated interpretations of assessment, experience, and ideology, and notes the important role evaluation of assessment must play in policy deliberations. (Author/SLD)

Describes the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and reviews and assesses research on its impact. Recommends policy reforms and randomized experiments to evaluate the program and any changes made to it. Weaknesses in research to date make the real impacts of WIC unclear. (Contains 79 references.) (SLD)

Prior work on organizational effectiveness and strategic management is applied to assessing the strategy and effectiveness of higher education systems. It is suggested that like organizations, systems need to address three kinds of effectiveness: goal achievement, resource acquisition, and constituent satisfaction. Both organizations and systems…

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new, synthetic paradigm for debate analysis and decision making that features the policy systems approach within a context of values as boundaries for decision. As background for the proposed theory, the paper (1) summarizes the notions of paradigm formation and shifts initially presented by T. Kuhn; (2)…

Analyzes research studies on the relationship between school integration and academic achievement of minority group children to determine if there is a causal connection, and discusses the importance of the meta analysis technique in policy formation. (ST)

An evaluation of the in-service education and training (INSET) of teachers in Britain is based on careful analysis of the characteristics of the evaluation task, target, and agent and, more specifically, upon the way in which these three factors interact in any one cell of the model. (JMF)

Examines the state of cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis in education, first examining the progress that has been made in these fields in the health and medical sectors. Explores one outstanding example of cost-benefit analysis and critiques four other educational evaluations. Synthesizes strengths of cost-effectiveness analysis in…

This paper focuses on transition programs for youth to postsecondary education, broadly considered. It addresses the following questions: (1) What models or programs of transition exist? (2) On what basis can we say one transition program is more effective than another? In other words, how is successful transition defined? (3) How are…