Grade inflation impacts university credibility, student courses of study, choices of institution, and other areas. There has been an upward shift in grades without a corresponding upward shift in knowledge gained. Some of the most frequently mentioned causes of grade inflation are: (1) student evaluations of professors; (2) student teacher…

Qualitative interviewing is a flexible and powerful tool to capture the voices and the ways people make meaning of their experience Learning to conduct semi-structure interviews requires the following six stages: (a) selecting the type of interview; (b) establishing ethical guidelines, (c) crafting the interview protocol; (d) conducting and…

The quality of evaluation of essay type answer books involving multiple evaluators for courses with large number of enrollments is likely to be affected due to heterogeneity in experience, expertise and maturity of evaluators. In this paper, we present a strategy to detect anomalies in evaluation of essay type answers by multiple evaluators based…

Carol Weiss did much to enhance the role of evaluation in her writings. Her work shows evaluators what affects their roles as they evaluate programs. Furthermore, her theory of change spells out the complexities involved in program evaluation. There are various processes involved in the evaluation of programs. The paper looks at some of the…

In this paper, the author considers certain aspects of the problem of obtaining unbiased information about the merits of a program or product, whether for purposes of decision making or for accountability. The evaluation of personnel, as well as the evaluation of proposals and evaluations, generally involves a different set of problems than those…

Good evaluation requires that evaluation efforts themselves be evaluated. Many things can and often do go wrong in evaluation work. Accordingly, it is necessary to check evaluations for problems such as bias, technical error, administrative difficulties, and misuse. Such checks are needed both to improve ongoing evaluation activities and to assess…

The field of evaluation faces a number of serious challenges in light of No Child Left Behind legislation, among them feasibility, resources, and blurring lines among research, evaluation, and assessment. At the same time, these challenges open the door for opportunities in evaluation. Now more than ever, the expertise of evaluators is needed and…

As the number of large federal programs increases, so, too, does the need for a more complete understanding of how to conduct evaluations of such complex programs. The research literature has documented the benefits of stakeholder participation in smaller-scale program evaluations. However, given the scope and diversity of projects in multi-site…

When assessment tasks are set for students in universities and colleges, a common practice is to advise them of the criteria that will be used for grading their responses. Various schemes for using multiple criteria have been widely advocated in the literature. Each scheme is designed to offer clear benefits for students. Breaking down holistic…

This paper describes a process-oriented approach to culturally competent evaluation, focusing on a case study of an evaluation of an HIV/AIDS educational program in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. We suggest that cultural competency in evaluation is not a function of a static set of prescribed steps but is achieved via ongoing reflection, correction, and…

There is already a growing literature on assessment and an emergent scholarship that people in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) community need both to promote and to build on if assessment is to be a scholarly activity. Awareness alone, however, is unlikely to be enough. The poor practice highlighted in this article is not simply…

Drug studies are often cited as the best exemplars of evaluation design. However, many of these studies are seriously biased in favor of positive findings for the drugs evaluated, even to the point where dangerous effects are hidden. In spite of using randomized designs and double blinding, drug companies have found ways of producing the results…

Methodologists have written for years about the importance of attending to important details in quantitative research, yet there has been little research investigating methodological practice in the social sciences. This study assessed the extent to which innovations and practices are adopted by researchers voluntarily. In particular, I use the…

Phrenologists believed that specific brain regions corresponded to certain character traits. In addition, the size of each brain region was believed to determine the strength of the respective trait. Phrenology originated in Austria with Franz Josef Gall and was popularized and commercialized in America at the end of the 19th century by Orson…

Although experiments are viewed as the gold standard for evaluation, some of their benefits may be lost when, as is common, outcomes are not defined for some sample members. In evaluations of marriage interventions, for example, a key outcome--relationship quality--is undefined when a couple splits up. This article shows how treatment-control…