Meaningfully engaging faculty in assessment presents a continual challenge for general education administrators. Faculty perceptions of assessment--including that assessment serves no purpose other than "checking a box" for accreditation and that it conveys little benefit to the instructor--often hinder instructor engagement. A low-cost…

We describe a detailed program evaluation for a University-wide teaching and learning grants program at a Canadian research-intensive university. This work was designed to determine if the program is driving the types of changes in practice it was designed to support. We administered a survey that included yes/no response and Likert-scale…

The Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) Act of 2014 and the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) Final Rule approved in 2016 outlined major policy changes in four areas: (1) health and safety; (2) consumer education; (3) equal access to high-quality care for children in families with low-incomes; and (4) quality improvement and…

One of CYFAR's unique features is the built-in planning year for all grant recipients. We present our evaluation team's approach during year 1 to establish a foundation and plan for scholarly publications during funding years 2-5. The systematic literature review provided the team with a better understanding of the culture and context of the…

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) seeks to improve student outcomes by promoting a variety of student success efforts. These efforts include direct programs with well-defined target populations and program participants, offering specific student support services following a program model, and indirect programs aimed at…

In this chapter, we draw on the data collected during our evaluations of six TAACCCT grants to describe the challenges, successes, and transformative effect of adopting a developmental evaluation approach for community college programs.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) supports 24 IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE) Programs that help develop university-based biomedical research capacity in states that historically receive low levels of extramural grant support. To assess the effectiveness of the Arkansas INBRE in meeting its biomedical research…

There has been little quantitative research on the impact of specialized teacher preparation for working with multilingual students. Yet districts, states, and the U.S. Department of Education are investing to increase the number of teachers with this specialized preparation. This article explores challenges in conducting research on this topic…

WestEd has partnered with the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing to conduct an external formative evaluation of the California Teacher Residency Grant Program (TRGP) since the launch of the TRGP in 2019. The ongoing evaluation is aimed at assisting residency practitioners, technical assistance providers, and policymakers to better…

California State University, Bakersfield (CSUB) received a six-year grant, "Providing Aid for STEM Success" (PASS), from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in March 2024 to offer scholarships and tailored support to academically talented, low-income students in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). In its inaugural…

The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) mandates that its Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) and Institutional Development Award Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE) institute formal mentoring programs to promote the core program objective of junior investigator development. Despite this NIGMS…

More evaluators have anchored their work in equity-focused, culturally responsive, and social justice ideals. Although we have a sense of approaches that guide evaluators as to how they should attend to culture, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), we have not yet established an empirical understanding of how evaluators measure DEI. In this…

The Partnerships for Student Success grant program is designed to improve educational outcomes for students who are economically disadvantaged by funding grantees to establish and strengthen community partnerships among school districts, businesses, government, and non-profit agencies. The Utah State Board of Education awarded four grants during…

The Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education (TEACH) Grant program provides grants to students who are completing or plan to complete the coursework required to begin a career in teaching. As a condition for receiving a TEACH Grant, a recipient must teach for at least four years in a high-need field at an elementary or…

The flexibility federal block grants provide recipients poses challenges for evaluation. These challenges include aggregating data on wide-ranging activities grant recipients implement and the outcomes they achieve. In 2014, we began designing an evaluation to address the challenges of assessing outcomes and to improve outcome accountability for…