Many Medicaid programs have either fully or partially carved out mental health services. The evaluation of carve-out plans requires a case-mix model that accounts for differing health status across Medicaid managed care plans. This article develops a diagnosis-based case-mix adjustment system specific to Medicaid behavioral health care. Several…

Here the essentials of the expertise of managing are presented as orientation toward (ethos, stance, and gaze), knowledge about, and knowledge how-to ("know-how"). These are grounded to specific content, summarized, and then connected to a typology of managing evaluation. The orienting questions for the field are reviewed to reveal what it means…

The Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) was heralded as a major overhaul of the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) program. Five years after passage of JTPA, the answer to the question of whether it has indeed managed to remedy CETA's shortcomings appears to be an unequivocal maybe. Although the JTPA has been praised by numerous…

A study compared practice-level variables between two sites that have been implementing system-of-care (SOC) principles for at least 5 years and two traditional service systems. Overall, SOC sites scored significantly higher than non-SOC sites in the child-centered and family-focused, community-based, and cultural competence domains. (Contains…

This report, prepared by the Delinquency and School Environments Program of the Center for Social Organization of Schools, presents a set of standards for implementing Program Development Evaluation (PDE), a method for strengthening school organizational and research effectiveness. This report supplements an earlier account of the Program…

The Program Standards Evaluation System was developed in response to evaluation requirements in the 1973 Rehabilitation Act. The system includes procedures for using standards data to monitor and evaluate vocational rehabilitation (VR) service outcomes and outputs as well as standards on key procedural issues. These guidance materials, volume 3 of…

In 1977 Congress mandated an assessment of the "economic and social consequences," of the nation's 4-H programs. The evaluation problem posed involved the identification of all social and economic effects caused by some facet of a very large, nationally decentralized youth education program. The design utilized drew on exploratory…

Various disparate activities have been defined as outreach, which is an element of social service/disease prevention programs. The history of outreach as a project element within federal social programs, central sources of variations in this element, measures of effectiveness and cost effectiveness, and recurring implementation issues are…

This guide was produced to help schools and school districts reduce the amount of waste they generate It shows how to start a waste reduction program or expand an existing one. The booklet shows how such programs can benefit schools, communities, and the environment by reducing, reusing, and recycling waste. Each section--schools, school…

Higher education experts tout learning outcomes assessment as a vehicle for program improvement. To this end the authors share a rubric designed explicitly to evaluate the quality of assessment and how it leads to program improvement. The rubric contains six general assessment areas, which are further broken down into 14 elements. Embedded within…

Formative assessment, as a strategy used to improve student learning, encounters several obstacles in its implementation. This study explores changes in teachers' views and practices as they are introduced to formative assessment in a high stakes testing and limited resource environment. The study examines the extent to which teachers use the…

The purpose of this study was to analyze the biology content, instructional strategies, and assessment methods of 100 biological science websites that were appropriate for Grade 12 educational purposes. For the analysis of each website, an instrument, developed from the National Science Education Standards (NSES) for Grade 12 Life Science coupled…

The goal of this study was to create an evaluation tool that would be the new standard for evaluating clinical competencies of interns in the field of orientation and mobility (O&M). Using results from previous research in this area, specific competency skills were identified and the O&M Clinical Competency Evaluation Matrix (CCEM) was…

A certain level of turnover can be expected in any well-managed organization; however, the alarming attrition rate facing the educational system requires national action. Organizations generally do not strive to attain zero turnover because a small amount of turnover is expected due to retirement and those who sincerely believe they are not a…

Continued improvement of the training and preparation of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) special agents is critical to the organization's ability to protect the national security of the United States. Too little attention has been paid to the factors that improve new agent trainees' (NATs) ability to learn and succeed in their training…