Evaluation professionals need to be nimble and innovative in their approaches in order to be relevant and provide useful evidence to decision-makers, stakeholders, and society in the crowded public policy landscape. In this article, we offer serious games as a method that can be employed by evaluators to address three persisting challenges in…

The data team intervention was designed to support Dutch secondary schools in using data while developing a solution to an educational problem. A data team can build school-wide capacity for data use through knowledge sharing among data team members, and knowledge brokerage between the team and other colleagues. The goal of this mixed-methods…

With decentralisation becoming increasingly widespread across Europe, evaluation and accountability are becoming key issues in ensuring quality provision for all (Altrichter & Maag Merki, 2010; Eurydice, 2004). In Europe, the dominant arrangement for educational accountability is school inspections. The purpose of this research is to identify…

School inspections are expected to have an impact on data use and improvement of schools. Schools are expected to generate data (e.g., self-evaluation reports and student achievement results) as part of the inspection process. This process, in turn, also generates data (e.g., inspection reports) for school improvement. The high-stakes context in…

At the end of secondary education in The Netherlands, students have to pass a final examination, consisting of an internal school-based assessment and an external national assessment. According to the Dutch inspectorate, to ensure the quality of final examinations, the discrepancy between both assessments must be less than 0.5 points (on a scale…

"Straight A's: Public Education Policy and Progress" is a biweekly newsletter that focuses on education news and events both in Washington, DC and around the country. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) "The High Cost of High School Dropouts": New Alliance Brief Says Dropouts from the Class of 2009 Represent…

School quality care has become important in many Western countries and a number of high quality school self-evaluation instruments has been developed and implemented to support this activity. However, little is known on the critical success factors for the use of school self-evaluation instruments. From this longitudinal study into the use of a…

The effects of school inspections on school improvement have been investigated only to a limited degree. The investigation reported on in this article is meant to expand our knowledge base regarding the impact of school inspections on school improvement. The theoretical framework for this research is partly based on the policy theory behind the…

Lack of use of educational evaluation results in the Netherlands was investigated by analyzing 14 curriculum evaluation studies. Results indicated that rational decision making with a technical (empirical) evaluation approach makes utilization of results most likely. Incremental decision making and a conformative approach make utilization least…

This overview of educational evaluation in the Netherlands provides background and details the state of the art in student, curriculum, and innovation evaluation. The role of international evaluation issues (such as evaluation criteria and the decision-making process) in evaluation theory and practice in The Netherlands is discussed. (BS)

A literature review examined major trends in organizations and training and the ways in which evaluation may help drive training impact. In addition, 3 case studies and 18 interviews were conducted in the United States to study evaluation methods. Recommendations about the use of evaluation for training impact were then formulated, and four Dutch…

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 selection of courseware is a difficult problem in the use of computers in education. A dissemination procedure for a courseware selection instrument involving workshops for computer coordinators is described. Computer coordinators of 267 Dutch secondary schools were asked how they used certain sources of information in selecting courseware.…

Easily accessible publications which report procedures and results of real evaluation studies of inservice teacher education are lacking. Therefore, this collection of case studies was initiated by the Association for Teacher Education in Europe (ATEE) to provide some practical help for practitioners. The first section of the volume is a general…

This document contains four papers from a symposium on cost analysis, evaluation, and feedback in human resource development. "Training Evaluation with 360-Degree Feedback" (Froukje A. Jellema) reports on a quasi-experimental study that examined the effectiveness of 360-degree feedback in evaluating the training received by nurses in a…