What are the challenges faced by a mid-south liberal arts college teacher education program, in its attempt to successfully meet the new Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) accreditation requirements? The Investigator studied the Educator Program Provider (EPP) during academic year 2015-2016. The challenges faced by the…

Academic program life cycle concept states each program's life flows through several stages: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. A mixed-influence diffusion growth model is fitted to enrolment data on academic programs to analyze the factors determining progress of academic programs through their life cycles. The regression analysis yield…

In order to assess elements of a healthy campus initiative at a rural regional university, program planners identified methods of ongoing evaluation that closely aligned with the initiative's goals and the population being served. As a result, a student health survey was administered to a voluntary sample of students (N = 484) during the fall 2009…

This case study provides an illustration of the heuristic practices of a high-performing research department, which in turn, will help build much needed models applicable in the context of large urban districts. This case study examines the accountability, planning, evaluation, testing, and research functions of a research department in a large…

The purpose of this paper was to describe the process of development of assessment instruments for the Comparing Options in Secondary Mathematics: Investigating Curriculum (COSMIC) project. The COSMIC project was a three-year longitudinal comparative study focusing on evaluating high school students' mathematics learning from two distinct…

The Project on Secondary Analysis at Northwestern University is funded to (1) test and develop new methods of evaluating educational programs, and (2) reanalyze existing evaluation data to assure that estimates of program effects are as unbiased and unequivocal as possible. This paper examines the topic of secondary analysis and describes some of…

Some of the methodological problems in analyzing and reporting qualitative data are addressed, and some solutions based on recent experiences in conducting several qualitative studies are proposed. The following are some guidelines for implementing an intuitive approach to analyzing and reporting qualitative data: (1) use a team of evaluators; (2)…

Institutions of higher education have developed a host of interventions to increase the retention of first-year students whose academic performance is inadequate. This study evaluated the overall effectiveness of an intervention strategy designed for first-year students on academic probation at a mid-western research university. A…

The naturalistic research perspective assumes that reality is multiplistic, phenomenological, and context-dependent. This perspective legitimizes the subjective insights of the investigator by acknowledging the interdependence of facts and values as well as of the investigator and the object of investigation. Although discrepancies between…

This evaluation report describes the process by which a large, urban-suburban school system evaluated its vocational education program and the results of the evaluation. The evaluation was built upon a set of broad evaluation questions addressing two components of the vocational-technical program: (1) questions related to employer needs and…

The Comparing Options in Secondary Mathematics: Investigating Curriculum (COSMIC) project is a longitudinal study of student learning from two types of mathematics curricula: integrated and subject-specific. Previous large-scale research studies such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) indicate that numerous variables are…

A mixed-method conceptual framework was developed from the literature and refined through an analysis of 57 empirical mixed-method evaluations. Five purposes for mixed-method evaluation are identified (triangulation, complementarity, development, initiation, and expansion) and analyzed using the framework of 7 design characteristics. (TJH)

This paper provides a rationale for studies of educational program implementation and offers a causal model for program evaluation emphasizing pupil-related variables that intervene between program implementation and outcome variables. The rationale is followed by a discussion of implementation as an evaluation construct. Process, independent…

Evaluators who perform formative evaluations would be well served to apprise themselves of recent survey research in framing formative evaluations. Illustrative examples are used from research into such diverse areas of activity as: the development of identities attached to different forms of modern rock and roll; the rationales that juvenile…

This paper proposes a model to establish which criteria are considered by stakeholders as valid for evaluating a program. The model is developed with the aim of increasing the credibility and use of evaluations. Stakeholders are involved in the identification of potential evaluation criteria, and ratings of validity and priority are used as the…