Schools, districts, and state-level educational organizations are experiencing a great shift in the way they do the business of education. This shift focuses on accountability, specifically through the expectation of the effective utilization of evaluative-focused efforts to guide and support decisions about educational program implementation. In…

Valuing in evaluation encompasses two distinct senses of the word, denoted by the terms merit and worth. Merit may be defined as an entity's inherent, intrinsic, context-free value, while an entity's worth is defined as its contextually determined, place-bound value. Determining an entity's merit may take place whenever a number of experts are…

An interview with Michael Scriven describes his thoughts and contributions to educational evaluation, the evolution of his career, and his current concerns and projects. (MH)

During the past decade, it has become fashionable to include an evaluation component with each new bilingual education program. The proliferation of empirical evaluation studies seems, however, not yet to have shed much light on very basic issues, such as the relationship between language of instruction and cognitive growth, academic achievement…