Since 2010, the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) has periodically administered the "Strong Foundations" survey, which documents the content, structure, and effective use of state postsecondary student unit record systems (PSURSs). This report highlights the results of the fourth administration of the survey,…

Four fundamental issues in program evaluation are discussed: (1) evaluations involve stakeholders with diverse interests; (2) data involve some degree of subjectivity; (3) meaningful interpretation of results requires understanding of the assumptions on which results are based; and (4) programs are dynamic and require flexible evaluations.…

Policy Implications Analysis (PIA) is a tool designed to maximize the likelihood that an evaluation report will have an impact on decision-making. PIA was designed to help people planning and conducting evaluations tailor their information so that it has optimal potential for being used and acted upon. This paper describes the development and…

Proposes an instructional program monitoring system which would gather, tabulate, and analyze -- at a central source and at regular intervals -- some continuous evidence of the degree to which defined program goals are being attained. (Author)

As the procedures of evaluation research have developed during recent years, it has become clear that the results of evaluation studies have failed to provide policy decision makers with useful information. An approach towards designing and implementing more useful evaluations--the stakeholder survey--is discussed. Stakeholders are individuals, or…

In spring 1985, the Office of Student Outreach at William Rainey Harper College (WRHC) in Illinois initiated a study to determine the effectiveness of their responses to telephone and mail inquiries for information about the college. A survey was mailed to a sample of 420 inquirers, asking about their information needs, their evaluation and use of…

It has been argued that the answer to public and political demands for a more responsive educational system lies in the practice of accountability. The future implementation of program budgeting may offer an attractive vehicle for accountability. Currently, many California school districts use the California Educational Information System (CEIS)…

Willson's informal analysis of the impact of 20 project evaluations suggests that many federal- and state-mandated evaluations have little effect on decision making. William J. Gephart reacts to this analysis and suggests reasons why evaluators' reports may not be used. Finally, Willson supports secondary data analysis. (GDC)

Although most school districts and schools are routinely involved in data collection, they do not typically use the data they collect in a systematic fashion to identify strengths and weaknesses and develop improvement strategies. One reason for the lack of data use is the perception that the data are being collected for someone else's purposes.…

Several contextual factors were investigated related to the information needs of educational administrators. In a survey of 119 administrators, the following issues were studied: (1) varying preferences for different information sources; (2) the effects on preferences for information sources of different decision or program development tasks; (3)…

Ways to monitor staff development programs include: (1) counting the number of participants; (2) obtaining participant reactions to programs; and (3) tracking participants by needs, objectives, and inservice topics. A needs assessment model of staff development focuses on information utilization, program impact, and evaluation approaches. (JN)

This Stufflebeam-Guba CIPP type model for the evaluation of innovations in education attempts to maximize the effectiveness of critical decisions through the timely reporting of relevant information in a useful form to appropirate levels of decision making. Evaluation is thus seen as the combination of effective decisions based on timely, relevant…

The Information Unit on Early Childhood Education was formed to provide practitioners in the field with a readily accessible source of information on new program developments, so that decisions about adopting programs might be based on a rational consideration of alternatives. The Unit contains the following features: a review of trends in early…

This report considers the role of manpower information in vocational education planning. Following a review of the manpower and educational contexts of vocational education planning, the report examines the concepts of manpower supply and demand and the sources of relevant information and methodologies for their estimation, considers criteria for…

Designed to provide a systematic means of analyzing the whole process of planning, implementation, and evaluation, these guidelines (1) suggest how national policies on user training may be related to national information policies in general, (2) suggest lines of action for the achievement of a national policy on user training, and (3) give advice…