The impact of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is usually understood in relation to schools and districts, but the legislation has also affected community-based organizations that operate school-linked programs. This case study of an after-school program in California demonstrates how educational accountability systems that emphasize students' academic…

This article discusses how to make process use an independent variable in evaluation practice: the purposeful means of building an organization's capacity to conduct and use evaluations in the long run. The goal of evaluation capacity building (ECB) is to strengthen and sustain effective program evaluation practices through a number of activities:…

Discusses the potential that program theory evaluation has to provide knowledge about the parts of a program that should be retained and the parts that can be changed or should be abandoned. Considers why program theory evaluation may be able to give some guidance about how a program should be changed to function in a new and different…

Asserts that pursuing use as the defining goal of evaluation can distort the allocation of evaluation resources and reduce the contributions of evaluation to broader social goals, such as social betterment. Pursuing use can result in an overemphasis on evaluations oriented toward program improvement at the expense of assessment of worth and other…

Until the recent introduction of a dynamic interview-based process, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), a Canadian development research funding agency, faced a challenge: project completion reports (PCRs) were not being completed in a timely and quality manner. This is a common problem many organizations face in completing…

There is concern that the nation's schools are not preparing students to excel in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. At both precollege and postsecondary levels, much effort is needed to create and implement powerful STEM curricula, prepare and support highly qualified teachers, deliver effective instruction, and give…