The Response to Intervention initiative is in danger of failing and being thrown on the ash heaps of countless education reform initiatives, but not because it is poorly structured, rather on account of poor implementation. Among the implementation mistakes are seven that can be watched for and avoided. (Contains 3 tables.)

The International Leadership Association's "Guiding Questions: Guidelines for Leadership Education Programs" (Ritch & Mengel, 2009) provides a framework to attend to leadership program development, redesign, evaluation, organized program review, questions concerning academic legitimacy and developing common program benchmarks. This article…

Research syntheses are appealing because they enable decision makers to determine quickly whether policies, programs, and practices will have effects on student achievement and, if so, the magnitudes of the likely effects. Such syntheses should present objective, clear, scientifically accurate, and defensible evidence in terms that educators can…

Student, teacher, and program evaluation are the themes of this issue. Articles include a supervisor's perspective on program evaluation; evaluating agricultural mechanics instruction; evaluating supervised occupational experience programs; evaluation of the vocational agriculture teacher; teacher evaluation from a student's perspective; what and…

Discusses the need to develop an appropriate pedagogy for cooperative education to integrate the educational outcomes from the work and classroom experience. Suggests that the model should structure, guide, and provide for the systematic evaluation of the learning resulting from the cooperative education assignment. (JOW)

Criticisms of traditional approaches to the assessment of student abilities and instructional program design are reviewed and alternative, dynamic approaches are suggested. A major feature of the suggested approaches is assistance to influence student performance and thus reveal the potential for change. The approaches are categorized and examined…

In many school districts, the pressure to raise test scores has created overnight celebrity status for formative assessment. Its powers to raise student achievement have been touted, however, without attending to the research on which these claims were based. Sociocultural learning theory provides theoretical grounding for understanding how…

Critiques two central issues of measurement as applied to the evaluation of student progress in cooperative education: reliability and validity. Urges the synthesis of measurement and professional judgment in all phases of the evaluation process. (SK)

Portfolio assessment can be used effectively to evaluate a student's performance in a course, to evaluate a student's performance in a program, and to evaluate an entire program or any of its components. (JOW)

From 1979-1982, ten American Association for State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) member institutions participated in developing a paradigm for evaluating student and program performance with respect to the intellectual abilities of communicating, quantifying, analyzing, synthesizing, and valuing. Faculty viewpoints toward the general process…

Defines authentic assessment as an approach to assessment that is designed to correspond as closely as possible to real world experience. Discusses the rubric, a tool that is being used across the curriculum, and how it can be used in technology education. Rubrics are scoring devices designed to assist in clarifying, communicating, and assessing…

The monograph defines and discusses single subject research designs in special education. Advantages of this approach with measuring change in handicapped children are noted. Observational techniques (event recording, duration recording, interval recording, and time sampling) are described, along with three types of single subject evaluation…

The monograph considers four issues in behavioral assessment of learning disabled (LD) students: primary assumptions of the behavioral approach, identification of LD students, program planning for identified students, and program evaluation. Among factors examined in the first section are the components of experimental analysis of behavior,…

The article reviews trends in measures of outcome efficacy in early intervention programs. Two recent reports are reviewed which illustrate the problems of relying solely upon child outcomes as measures of program efficacy. Measurement approaches that take into consideration the transactional nature of early intervention are suggested. (Author/DB)

This conference summary presents the views of five early childhood special education professionals, each of whom recommended one child outcome measure and one family outcome measure for use in a typical early childhood special education program serving children from birth to five years with a range of handicapping conditions. (Author/JW)