Policymakers, accreditation bodies, students and their families, and other stakeholders increasingly press institutions of higher education to provide clear evidence of their value. Institutions emphasize their status as a public good claiming their role in developing human capital and informed citizens, enabling social class mobility, and…

At some future point, when a definitive history of the assessment movement is written, one of the most frequently cited, influential publications will be "Assessment Update" ("AU"). Since 1989, this bimonthly newsletter has been published by Jossey-Bass in partnership with Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis…

This handbook is designed to guide readers in developing a local assessment of the community's progress toward the National Education Goals. It is organized around those questions that the National Education Goals Panel has used to measure national and state progress in its 1991 report. Information in the introduction includes the history of the…

Georgia's Needs Assessment Package, which has many sample forms, includes a procedure which helps to identify short-range and long-range educational needs. This procedure utilizes community participation which broadens the decision-making base and serves to legitimatize actual decisions. It utilizes the opinions of professional educators,…

Experiences and events are presented on determining a successful way of conducting an education needs assessment on the Jicarilla Apache reservation in Dulce, New Mexico, using the following process: (1) identifying needs to devise questions on expressed concerns; (2) analyzing data; and (3) developing a program to correct the concern. The…

Evaluations of rural and small schools done by stakeholders provide a broader base of involvement than those done internally by persons with a vested interest or potential conflict of interest. Presents tasks for initiating a stakeholders' evaluation, groups considered to be stakeholders, evaluation standards, and elements to include in a school…

The purpose of this competency-based education program is to help interested school districts implement, manage, and evaluate a comprehensive program at the high school level. The final report discusses the definition and collection of selective practices that have potential for further use; targeted development activities, including planning and…

Some attributes of policies for achieving equality of opportunity are discussed together with their rationales. The significance of inequality and the role of education are brought together to rehearse the crux of the issue and indicate why such importance has been attached to the debates and studies of equality of opportunity. Aspects of the…

By using the deductive or the inductive approach to needs assessment, or a combination of both approaches, school administrators can allocate physical or human resources in accordance with community priorities. (DCS)

Divided into six chapters, this user's manual accompanies a battery of tests developed by the Educational Progress in Careers (EPIC) project which was organized to develop and validate a system for evaluating career, economic, and community education projects in Florida schools. Chapter 1 presents an action checklist of steps to be followed by…

Based upon the premise that school divisions in Manitoba, Canada, should evaluate and improve upon themselves, this evaluation model was developed. The participating personnel and the development of the evaluation model are described. The model has 11 parts: (1) needs assessment; (2) statement of objectives; (3) definition of objectives; (4)…

For too long New York City's high schools have not prepared even a majority of students for graduation. There is no single solution to the problems confronting the city's schools, but the city needs to do better--and it can. Over the past several years, New York City has undertaken a far-reaching process of education reform. This report describes…

The deliberations of representatives from eleven Asian Unesco member countries focus on alternative approaches to identification of needs and resources as a basis for curriculum development, strategies and methodologies adopted in translating the curriculum into teaching learning materials and learning aids, training of teachers, problems involved…

Despite attention to cultural considerations in teacher education, curriculum development, and educational policy making and analysis, evaluation remains the last bastion of ethnocentrism in educational evaluation. Evaluators should accept the challenge of finding new ways to explore educational successes within various cultural contexts. More…

A democratic model of educational evaluation and some policy recommendations to develop culturally appropriate evaluation are presented. The traditional hard science paradigm in research must be replaced with evaluation designed to feed back to communities of varying cultural backgrounds. The most fundamental assumption of the new model is…