The question of how well students are doing is central to the enterprise of higher education. Students want to know what grade was received on the paper or test. Faculty want to know what it will take to reach tenure or be reappointed. Admissions staff want to know how many students need to be enrolled in order to provide tuition revenue required…

Evaluations of special education interventions are different from research on medical interventions. Educational evaluations would be more useful if they applied an actuarial, or probability approach. Information should be collected over time and using various measures, thus increasing the available data. (GDC)

Issues concerning students' evaluation of college faculty are discussed. Several views of this process are presented. Having identified relevant variables or paradigms, possible relationships between the variables can be studied (models and theories). The assumptions underlying these paradigms include the following: that students have a right and…

Using 45 undergraduate evaluations of videotaped lectures, this study examined the effects of the purposes of rating on measures of accuracy in observing teacher behavior and in evaluating teacher performance. Results suggest that the purpose affects the way raters process behavioral information without necessarily affecting the general level of…

Ways to improve the validity of assessment of college students are discussed. Validity problems often have occurred because the purpose of assessment was not clear. Traditionally, college students have been tested for admission and placement. However, the results of these tests have been used for other purposes, such as comparing institutions.…

This report summarizes conclusions from previous reports and makes explicit comparisons between assessment approaches. The report is organized in four sections under the headings: Design, Content Analysis, Costs, and Analysis of Technical Quality. The first section (Design) describes salient characteristics of each assessment approach, the…

This paper presents a primer on building a scientifically oriented teacher evaluation instrument. It stresses the importance of accurate measures and accepts the presupposition that scientific approaches provide the most accurate measures of student teacher performance. The paper discusses the scientific concepts of validity and reliability, and…