Student engagement needs to be context-specific to embrace holistic learning for increasingly diverse students in higher education. This paper presented a case study on the context-specific adaptation of a student engagement measure for a private university in Bangladesh. The adaptation process involved steps such as benchmarking theoretically…

Program evaluations that lack experimental design often fail to produce evidence of impact because there is no available control group. Theory-based evaluations can generate evidence of a program's causal effects if evaluators collect evidence along the theorized causal chain and identify possible competing causes. However, few methods are…

Dynamic assessment is a dialectic procedure requiring teachers to assess learners' progress by paying attention to students' errors while providing graduated prompts to help them fix them. Although previous studies have focused on the teachers' competence in carrying out the dynamic assessment, this case study explores the dynamic assessment…

Over the last decade, societal pressure has increased on public research agencies to provide evidence that their research contributes to achieve development goals. To address this challenge, the French Agricultural Research Center for International Development (Cirad), developed an ex-post impact assessment method based on the impact pathway…

This paper explores the use, functions and constitutive effects of evaluation systems in local school governance, and identifies how contextual factors affect various uses of evaluation in this context. This case study of three Swedish municipalities demonstrates that local evaluation systems are set up to effectively sustain local school…

Since the 1990s many strength-based assessments (for example, inventories, checklists, interview schedules) have been developed for use with children and young people, but these have offered a limited appraisal of the contexts in which strengths are present. In this study a new form of contextualised strength-based assessment was used within the…

In light of the emergence of statistical analysis techniques based on data mining in education sciences, and the potential they offer to detect non-trivial information in large databases, this paper presents a procedure used to detect factors linked to academic achievement in large-scale assessments. The study is based on a non-experimental,…

A multicultural-ecological (M-Eco) method assesses multiple levels of a client's presentation, such as individual, micro-, meso-, exo-, macro-, and chronosystems. An M-Eco method is a culturally sensitive practice of Bronfenbrenner's (1995) ecological perspective that focuses on behavior's contextual and interactional nature and an individual's…

In two studies 3-year-olds' understanding of the context-specificity of normative rules was investigated through games of pretend play. In the first study, children protested against a character who joined a pretend game but treated the target object according to its real function. However, they did not protest when she performed the same action…

A tool used in student-centered education is discussion among students in small learning groups. The Western origin of student-centered education, coupled with cross-cultural differences in communication styles, may detract from its cross-cultural applicability. This study investigates how in student-centered education, students' cultural…

This chapter describes the adaptation of the case study method to assessing increasingly complex, comprehensive reform initiatives that highlight the blurring of the boundaries between phenomenon and context and the concurrence of multiple interventions. Completed studies of two education reform programs illustrate the ongoing challenges of…

Crude mental models should take priority over designs in guiding evaluative inquiry. Three illustrative mental models are shown to have implications for how method mixing is carried out in practice. One of the models, a complex and contextually contingent model, is applied to the Arizona Student Assessment Program. (SLD)

Illustrative case studies support a contingency approach to mixed-method evaluation in which the evaluation team bases its selection of methods on the information to be provided, the availability of data, and the degree to which the program environment is an open or closed system. (SLD)

Discusses narratives and the possible narrative structure of the process leading up to the completed article. Discusses two approaches to categorization and the most commonly referred to criteria for identifying narratives as well as the problems principally involved in punctuation of sequences and thus in deciding which narrative we are dealing…

Presents results of a study of the organizational and political context of internal and external school evaluation in four European countries, focusing on evaluation methods and the role of the inspectorate. Also presents a comparative analysis of four cases of school self-evaluation at the elementary level in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands,…