Cost-effectiveness analysis is rarely used in education. When it is used, it often fails to meet methodological standards, especially with regard to cost measurement. Although there are occasional criticisms of these failings, we believe that it is useful to provide a listing of the more common concerns and how they might be addressed. Based upon…

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) was designed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to evaluate the quality, equity, and efficiency of school systems around the world. Specifically, the PISA has assessed 15-year-old students' reading, mathematics, and science literacy on a 3-year cycle, since…

A cross-case analysis of four National Science Foundation (NSF) case studies identified both unique details and common themes related to promoting the use and influence of multisite evaluations. The analysis provided evidence of diverse evaluation use by stakeholders and suggested that people taking part in the multisite evaluations perceived…

Child assessment practices in English and Korean preschools were compared by analysing data from interviews with educators, examples of child assessment, and official documents from each country. Child assessment in England was systematically implemented and characterised by several methodological and procedural strengths, whereas assessment in…

This paper examines the current academic and policy literatures concerning school evaluation in primary and secondary education within the OECD countries. First, it provides a typology of the existing systems of school evaluation across the OECD. It encompasses the diverse criteria and instruments commonly used to carry out schools evaluation, as…

Program design can aid problem-solving or decision-making tasks faced by evaluators. It can be used to facilitate evaluation planning through the definition of program boundaries and the generation and focusing of evaluation questions. Further, it can provide evaluation information about theoretical, historical, and political contexts of a…

This paper examines possible explanations for the fact that evaluation results are rarely used. Most explanatory factors for use of results in decision making mentioned in the literature have been clustered in three categories of variables. They concern: (1) the making of decisions about the practical problem; (2) the way in which evaluation is…

The history of the African people before slavery and colonization illustrates the ways in which different pictures of reality are created by which data are selected and ignored. The model of inquiry that verifies historical accuracy can help all program evaluators provide greater truth and equity for their clients. (SLD)