Certain challenges are inherent in collecting data to evaluate nonformal education programs and settings. One challenge relates to the complexity of the educational system in which nonformal learning takes place. Separating the learning effects of a nonformal education program on participants from the effects of other essential elements of their…

Youth smoking and physical inactivity are significant public health issues, with implications for both health and education stakeholders, as school-based policies and programs have the potential to reach a broad population of youth to address these issues. Knowledge exchange tools designed around comprehensive school-level data collection systems…

The Council of Australian Governments (COAG) has endorsed a "Closing the Gap" agenda designed to improve the lives of Indigenous Australians. The agenda is distilled in a series of targets, one of which is the goal of halving the gap for Indigenous students in Year 12 attainment or equivalent (Certificate II or above) attainment rates by…

Our study compared the quantitative and qualitative outcomes associated with course evaluations collected over the Internet with those collected using a paper-and-pencil method. We randomly assigned students to 1 of the 2 different formats. There was no significant difference in quantitative student responses based on administration method, but…

This article describes an innovative data collection procedure. A subsample (n = 164) of a longitudinal research project was assessed using a bank-issued check survey procedure (a removable bank check on which response fields were printed). Using the new procedure, parents returned their surveys simply by depositing or cashing their incentive…

This commentary highlights the work of the Collaborative for Building After-School Systems (CBASS), a collaborative of mature, city and county-wide nonprofit OST intermediaries, to develop and adopt common youth-, program- and system-level measures that are easy and cost-effective for local systems to implement. By agreeing to adopt and publicly…

The effects of data-gathering methods on pragmatic data have been well documented, yet an inquiry into the interactive effects of assessment tasks with pragmatic instruction has received scant attention. This study investigated the interaction between two assessment tasks (e-mail and phone) and two types of pragmatic instruction (explicit and…

The School Improvement Project (SIP) and Local School Development Project are two school-based constituency planning programs. The Documentation Unit is responsible for ongoing documentation and evaluation of them. The goals of the unit included holistic school assessment, development of school based needs assessment and evaluation activities, and…

The benefits accrued through the use of triangulation as both a design strategy and an analytic tool cannot be overstated. Triangulation allows for the clustering and organizing of disparate yet related data. Finding out what the data have in common and how the data are different allow the researcher to eliminate (or reduce) the number of…

This project, located in a large metropolitan school district, concerns the operation and evaluation of three Mathematics Demonstration Centers. In the first phase, directions are given about the necessary information to be gathered by the evaluating organization, (e.g. the school district administrative organization, size of school district,…

Evaluated methods for selecting respondents who would respond accurately to items on a job-analysis questionnaire. One method involved obtaining from employees measures that assessed background, performance, and organizational information. A second method involved collecting job-analysis data from all potential job-analysis respondents and…

This guide gives middle school teachers and principals the tools they need to get answers to their questions about program evaluation. It shows how to use the information to work more effectively and efficiently and explains how to use program evaluation techniques to make sure that the approaches selected really solve the problems of interest.…

Based on a decade of evaluation experience, the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT) has developed the Integrated Evaluation Methods (IEM) Package, a series of conceptual and methodological applications to enhance CSAT-funded evaluation activities. Products in the IEM Package are organized within an evaluation framework constructed on the…

Basic questions about the evaluation of professional development efforts are explored, including the nature and purposes of evaluation, the critical levels of professional development evaluation, and the difference between evidence and proof in evaluation. Evaluation, which is defined as the systematic investigation of merit or worth, can be…

Discusses three games which have been developed to collect evaluative feedback on instruction. Use of this process makes it possible to collect data in an enjoyable manner. (RAO)