The COVID-19 pandemic struck during a period of extreme polarization in American politics. Unsurprisingly, responses to it quickly became politicized despite increasingly clear findings from scientific and public health communities about the most effective approaches for limiting its spread. We ask how the politicization affected pandemic response…

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…

The author enjoyed reading Katharine Hay's ambitious and humbling visions for evaluation field building in South Asia. She has successfully positioned herself on a high mountain with a wonderful set of binoculars that enable her to see the entire evaluation landscape of South Asia. She magically sees and describes significant historical forces and…

Current economic conditions and the increasing competition for government funding are leading to an increased focus on the impact of research. Measuring the impact of research is difficult because not all impacts are direct and some can be negative or result from the identification of problems that require a non-research response. The time between…

The International Reading Association's Position Statement on Young Adolescents' Literacy Learning states, "It is during the middle years of schooling that most students refine their reading preferences, become sophisticated readers of informational text, and lay the groundwork for the lifelong reading habit." As the National Assessment of…

How policy is developed and how evaluators can participate in the process are discussed, focusing on federal evaluators. The strongest weapon of an evaluator is a short, easy-to-read report with a simple, compelling message. Federal policy evaluators must learn to be content with slow gains. (SLD)

Randomly selected recommendations (N=176)--concerning performance evaluations of programs of public organizations--made by the General Accounting Office (GAO) in fiscal year 1983 were analyzed. Reasons for the exceptionally high acceptance rate (between 51 percent and 77 percent ) are discussed, including the GAO's status as a formal legally…

The large government market in evaluation that has developed in recent years does not follow the idealized image of open markets because of the contracting process, which means that a few firms conduct most evaluations. To produce honest, unbiased evaluations, evaluation ethics must take government market factors into consideration. (SLD)

Directors of the largest and most active executive branch evaluation offices from 14 government agencies assessed the impacts of the first year of federal government "reinvention." Results suggest an erosion of government capacity to conduct evaluations that is expected to increase in the presidential election year. (SLD)

In the volume reviewed, papers from 15 international experts address how government can use evaluation to guide (or control) education while attempting to decentralize administrative structure and pedagogical content. Thoughtful analysis is provided in highly integrated coverage of theory and practice. (SLD)

Evaluation activities in China are examined, focusing on housing reform. How evaluation functions in justifying the political initiatives of the Chinese Communist Party is explored, and the possibility that evaluation research can become an academic field in China using Western methodology is discussed. (SLD)

This paper focuses on the experience of the Policy Education Centre on Assistance to Transition in providing monitoring and evaluation services to "Support for Improvement in Governance and Management in Central and Eastern European Countries" (SIGMA), a joint project of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the…

Five papers and an introduction discuss internal evaluation (IE), concentrating on the various sources of authority for IE and ways of enhancing IE authority. The roles of internal evaluators, conflicts in the evaluation process, and evaluation in a state education agency are reviewed. (SLD)

Views of five members of the evaluation community in Washington (D.C.) concerning the future of evaluation in the federal government are summarized. Evaluators include (1) E. Chelimsky; (2) M. F. Mangano; (3) J. S. Wholey; (4) R. C. Sonnichsen; and (5) C. Wye. (SLD)

This paper addresses the question of the assessment of faculty job performance at American colleges and universities, examining historical and current trends in faculty evaluation. It reviews the concept of faculty evaluation in the colonial period through the 20th century, focusing on recent efforts to hold faculty more accountable for their job…