The past few years have seen efforts in several countries and a wide range of disciplines to adopt and apply existing professional standards for guiding and judging evaluation services and/or develop new standards. Some of the efforts have drawn from the work and products of the North American Joint Committee on Standards for Educational…

This article addresses the construction of "critical friendships" within the practice of one particular program evaluation. It focuses on the evolution of relationships developed during one 2-year program evaluation study that examined a collaborative educational project. Findings show that a caring interest and mentoring rapport developed between…

Evaluation can be a complicated, time-consuming process. It is no wonder so many organizations resist doing it. In this article, the author outlines the steps in the evaluation process and presents sample questions in each step. The author also defines and exemplifies the components for a successful evaluation strategy.

Fidelity may be defined as the extent to which delivery of an intervention adheres to the protocol or program model originally developed. Fidelity measurement has increasing significance for evaluation, treatment effectiveness research, and service administration. Yet few published studies using fidelity criteria provide details on the…

Empowerment evaluation involves a program's stakeholders in designing and implementing an evaluation of their own program, thus contributing to the program's improvement and self-determination (Fetterman, 1994, 1996). It appeared to be an appropriate approach for evaluating a mental health drop-in center, which had congruent goals of collaboration…

The purpose of the current study was to analyze the relationship between automated essay scoring (AES) and human scoring in order to determine the validity and usefulness of AES for large-scale placement tests. Specifically, a correlational research design was used to examine the correlations between AES performance and human raters' performance.…

The study is to examine if preservice teachers improve their social studies teaching and learning when they follow a structured and guided methods course based on the four-step social studies teaching cycle. The four steps are 1) preinstructional exploration, 2) assessment development, 3) instructional development, and 4) reflective extension. The…

The purpose of this article is to set forth an innovative methodological protocol for culturally grounding interventions with high-risk youths in alternative schools. This study used mixed methods to evaluate original and adapted versions of a culturally grounded substance abuse prevention program. The qualitative and quantitative methods…

Analysis of the cost-effectiveness of 29 Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) models suggests that all 29 models are less cost-effective than an alternative approach for raising student achievement, involving rapid assessment systems that test students 2 to 5 times per week in math and reading and provide rapid feedback of the results to students and…

With the proliferation of the Internet and World Wide Web applications, people are increasingly interacting with government to citizen (G2C) eGovernment systems. It is therefore important to measure the success of G2C eGovernment systems from the citizen's perspective. While general information systems (IS) success models have received much…

Academics are facing significant challenges in preparing indigenous students for employment in the multicultural working environment of hospitality and tourism organisations. In dealing with the impact of the new skills and flexibilities demanded by increasing globalisation, the indigenous workforce needs to possess a multicultural perspective and…

The discussion here covers five articles that are linked in the sense that they all treat population invariance. This discussion of population invariance is a somewhat broader treatment of the subject than simply a discussion of these five articles. In particular, occasional reference is made to publications other than those in this issue. The…

The purpose of this paper is to share a performance assessment task and rubric designed to assess secondary school mathematics preservice teachers' pedagogical content knowledge and skills. The assessment task and rubric were developed in collaboration with five education faculty, four arts and sciences faculty, and four high school teachers over…

Three reports on last April's shootings left Virginia Tech under a mountain of recommendations--roughly 400 in all. So far the university has dealt with some of the most significant ones. Virginia Tech established an emergency-notification system, created a team to assess at-risk students and employees, and hired additional police officers and…

Librarians at Washington State University Vancouver helped the campus develop a method of assessing its General Education Program, a program based on university learning goals, one of which is information literacy. The assessment method, which relies on an electronic portfolio (ePortfolio) along with rubrics to evaluate work in the ePortfolio,…