The United States has experienced tremendous growth in the development of coaching initiatives including professional training programs, state endorsements and resources for coaches. These developments bring attention to the potential for coaching to improve education. They also raise the question of how best to facilitate implementation in local…

Evidence-based policy-making and other recent reforms in public steering emphasize the role systematic evidence can play in improving decision making and public policies. Increasing deficits heighten the pressure on public authorities to legitimate public spending and to find savings. Existing studies show that the influence of research-based…

Evaluation research should be viewed as the source of knowledge on two levels: (1) how evaluation studies utilize results, and (2) how the knowledge that was evaluated is utilized. The purpose of this document is to systematically examine the literature pertinent to the utilization of evaluation results. The impetus for legitimization of…

Class-size reduction (CSR) has been a complex and contentious issue for the last quarter century. Although the small-class concept was adopted because it appealed to common sense, research over time has revealed a mix of confounding variables, instead of a definitive conclusion. Some CSR efforts, such as Tennessee's Project STAR and Wisconsin's…

It has been argued that the answer to public and political demands for a more responsive educational system lies in the practice of accountability. The future implementation of program budgeting may offer an attractive vehicle for accountability. Currently, many California school districts use the California Educational Information System (CEIS)…

Teacher educators are in a state of near paralysis concerning their program evaluations. This paralysis comes from adopting wholesale a dysfunctional evaluative point of view from the dominant educational research establishment. There is a history of overestimating the current relevance of experimental behavioral science models for the gathering…

Program planning and implementation surveys were completed by 128 teachers of learning disabled students in 42 states. Seven research questions relating to the relationship between teacher or student characteristics and decision behavior were addressed through chi-square analyses or one-way analyses of variance. It was found that the types of…

This Stufflebeam-Guba CIPP type model for the evaluation of innovations in education attempts to maximize the effectiveness of critical decisions through the timely reporting of relevant information in a useful form to appropirate levels of decision making. Evaluation is thus seen as the combination of effective decisions based on timely, relevant…

This handbook was designed to assist local Teacher Corps projects to plan and implement the Teacher Corps'"Fourth Outcome:" the adoption or adaptation of the project's educational improvement activities by other educational agencies and institutions. Section I provides an overview of seven scenarios which might be applicable to local…

Suggestions are presented to help vocational education programs become effective lobbyists: decide what you want, choose the appropriate forum, take a position, review current laws, know what is allowed, identify your leaders, form a network, cultivate legislative leaders, take part in hearings, provide information, testify, and build working…

A survey of administrators, teachers, and parents in 15 Elementary Secondary Education Act Title I school districts indicated that evaluations are used locally to meet federal and state requirements, to inform parents and staff, and to confirm positive attitudes toward a program. Standardized achievement tests, the backbone of Title I evaluations,…

The paper reviews previous research studies and conferences which have dealt with the question of whether large-scale testing programs are effective. It is concluded that such programs, defined as efforts to determine the status of student achievement on a school, district, state, or national basis, are not serving the informational needs of the…

A statistical definition of information utilization for policy making decisions and an evaluation impact test to determine its occurrence are proposed. A univariate time series analysis is used to identify the internal trend for a given policy output variable and to control its effect. Two problems are identified in implementing an evaluation…

A planning and evaluation model for management information systems (MIS) at the institutional or system level in higher education is presented. The procedure provides an analytical approach for assessing the effectiveness of an existing information system utilizing a variation of the Business Systems Planning methodology developed by the IBM…

While the initial phases of instructional program development are heavily dependent on knowledge sources outside the classroom, knowledge developed in the classroom by the individual teacher is usually vital to program implementation. Interviews with teachers, principals, and district administrators connected with four urban elementary schools…