The first national youth fitness evaluation conducted in the United States was in 1958. Since that time, schools have continued to administer fitness evaluations using a variety of tests with no national-level assessment of youth fitness [Institute of Medicine (IOM), 2012]. However, in September 2012, the Presidential Youth Fitness Program (PYFP)…

A comprehensive assessment system is one in which three types of assessments: summative, benchmark, and formative assessments are routinely administered to all students in K-12 classrooms. The first part of this report summarizes the research on comprehensive assessment systems and provides clarity in terms of how each individual assessment type…

The LIGRU project is concerned with the objectives, methods, and evaluation of literature instruction in the Swedish comprehensive school. This document presents a taxonomy of educational objectives and evaluation instruments. The resulting scheme, derived from a review of other classification schema, has two dimensions -- goal area and aspect.…

Virtually every profession has adopted a special vocabulary and style of communication which tends to be incomprehensible to persons outside the profession. The special vocabularies serve the professions well--until it comes time to communicate with "outsiders." Then, the professional jargon must be translated into "universal…

This guidebook offers suggestions that can help district and school staff choose an approach for evaluating school-reform efforts. It is intended to provide further evaluation assistance to education stakeholders to ensure that schools conduct evaluation of whole-school reform efforts in a way that provides valid and useful information for…

Student assessment is dependent on the educational views of the teacher. Arts pedagogy in comprehensive schools has several approaches, orientations, and even genres, each in turn having hidden practices of student evaluation. These stem on the one hand from the pedagogical tradition of the field (music, visual arts, drama, craft) and on the other…

Many educators believe that comprehensive school reform (CSR) holds real promise for improving schools, as many CSR programs are based in research and have documented success. However, in the past year, there has been increased emphasis on CSR programs' evidence of effectiveness and scrutiny of CSR evaluations' degree of rigor. Questions exist…

The institutional self-study required by a university hospital's reaccreditation process is explored, with a discussion of benefits and costs. A reaction by C. F. Waltz and A. Belcher reaffirms the value of reaccreditation studies and discusses ways of minimizing costs without compromising comprehensiveness and utility of results. (SLD)

Afterschool programs are rich with educational opportunities. Programs can make what is learned during the traditional day vibrant and relevant to the lives of children. Comprehensive programs that are integrated into the regular school program and draw on resources within the community can yield positive outcomes for children. Key to this…

Programs targeting at-risk young adolescents, aged 10 to 15 years, were studied through a literature review and examination of issues related to evaluating programs for at-risk youth, and site visits to 9 programs at 6 locations. Chapter 1 introduces the study and its objectives, and chapter 2 reviews the literature on youth at risk. Chapter 3…

This newsletter summarizes the work of a committee, set up by the Ministry of Education, which sought to define the objectives and the methods of student evaluation and to draw up a proposal for reforming and standardizing student evaluation in the comprehensive and the secondary school. Deficiencies of current methods of student evaluation are…

The inherent methodological problem in conducting research at multiple sites is how to best derive an overall estimate of program impact across multiple sites, best being the estimate that minimizes the mean square error, that is, the square of the difference between the observed and true values. An empirical example illustrates the use of the…

This is volume three of a six-volume guide to the establishment and management of a comprehensive family-support program. This volume explains the role played by evaluation in the evolution of family-support and family-education services, introduces key aspects and important considerations in planning an evaluation, and discusses how to choose a…

In the late 1990s the Texas Education Agency advocated the transformation of all counseling services into developmental guidance programs. This document describes the process undertaken and the lessons learned when evaluating a small, rural school district in north Texas in order to begin this model transformation. The purpose of the study was to…

During the 1969-70 school year, the Early School Admissions Program (ESAP) for 4-year-old disadvantaged pupils was offered in 22 Baltimore City Public Schools. Each center had both a morning and an afternoon session enrolling different children. The overall goal of the ESAP was to improve the disadvantaged pupil's ability to learn, to provide…