This article explores issues that had to be confronted over a three-year period in terms of two New York State funded grants for which I was the evaluator. Major, critical challenges are presented, described, and discussed. Specifically, the paper addresses issues related to lack of planning at the grant design stage that resulted in challenges…

Many studies of education interventions make claims about impacts on students' outcomes. Some studies have designs that enable readers to make causal inferences about the effects of an intervention but others have designs that do not permit these types of conclusions. To help policymakers, practitioners, and others make sense of study results, the…

The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) evaluates research studies that look at the effectiveness of education programs, products, practices, and policies, which the WWC calls "interventions." Many studies of education interventions make claims about impacts on students' outcomes. Some studies have designs that enable readers to make causal…

The foster youth education program strives to increase graduation rates by improving academic performance and encouraging student retention through an innovative collaboration between tutors, social workers, and schools to provide individualized support. The pilot program was funded by U.S. Department of Education Innovation Funds, which evolving…

Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard in research but may not fully explain or predict outcome variations in community-based interventions. Demonstrating efficacy of externally driven programs in well-controlled environments may not translate to community-based implementation where resources and priorities vary. A bottom-up evaluation…

Contradictory findings from "well-implemented" rigorous evaluations invite researchers to identify the differences that might explain the contradictions, helping to generate testable hypotheses for new research. This panel will examine efforts to ensure that the large number of local evaluations being conducted as part of four…

Mathematics Recovery (MR) is designed to identify first graders who are struggling in mathematics and provide them with intensive one-to-one tutoring. We report findings from a 2-year evaluation of MR conducted in 20 elementary schools across five districts in two states. The design allowed for the estimation of the counterfactual growth…

There is a growing recognition of the value of measuring fidelity of implementation (FOI) as a necessary part of evaluating interventions. However, evaluators do not have a shared conceptual understanding of what FOI is and how to measure it. Thus, the creation of FOI measures is typically a secondary focus and based on specific contexts and…

Five knowledge-for-action theories are summarized and compared in this chapter for their evaluation implications: knowledge utilization, diffusion, implementation, transfer, and translation. Usually dispersed across multiple fields and disciplines, these theories are gathered here for a common focus on knowledge and change. Knowledge in some form…

Successfully providing guidance to others is no easy task. Such is the challenge faced by committees charged with developing guidelines for ethical professional practice. The process of establishing and revising the Program Evaluation Standards (Joint Committee, 1994), for example, is a multiyear task that must seems endless to participants: a…

School program evaluation researchers face a set of overlapping questions concerning our roles in the field: For the sake of "the data" and in quest of "the truth," am I a shrewd researcher before all else? For the sake of community-building and establishing respectful, reciprocal relationships with my school partners, am I first a gracious school…

Multilevel modeling techniques facilitated examination of relationships between fidelity indicators and outcomes associated with a summer literacy intervention. Three-level growth models were specified to capture the extent to which students experienced instruction and to demonstrate the ways in which dosage-response relationships manifest in…

Programs and policies invariably contain new knowledge. Theories about knowledge utilization, diffusion, implementation, transfer, and knowledge translation theories illuminate some mechanisms of change processes. But more often than not, when it comes to understanding patterns about change processes, "the foreground" is privileged more…

A new generation of public programs emerges, which specifically addresses complex societal problems we witness today. Programs for these types of complex issues--in this article, we consider more closely the challenge of sustainable development--are characterized by emergent design, learning processes between diverse actors, and adaptive…

The use of theory-driven evaluation is an emerging practice in the military--an aspect generally unknown in the civilian evaluation community. First developed during the 1991 Gulf War and applied in both the Balkans and Afghanistan, these techniques are now being examined in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) as a means to evaluate the…