Many state departments of education have revised their state school counseling models to reflect the ASCA National Model for school counseling programs. Only a few states have developed statewide evaluation systems to gather information about program effectiveness and/or to promote effective local program evaluation. This qualitative study…

This article examines definitions, rationales, and calculations associated with higher education performance measures: persistence, retention rate, attrition rate, drop-out rate, and graduation rate. Strengths and limitations of these measures are scrutinized relative to online master's programs. Outcomes of a sample of students (N = 96) enrolled…

Care Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRISs) have advanced and matured, a number of states and localities have undertaken evaluations to validate the systems. Such efforts stem from the desire to ensure that the system is designed and operating in the ways envisioned when the system was established. Given that a central component in a QRIS…

Extensive research has been conducted on improving student academic achievement and techniques to improve student learning. There has been little research that addresses the relationship between student achievement and teacher performance. The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between performance-based teacher evaluation…

This report describes a policy analysis project examining principal evaluation instruments, policies and processes in the fifty United States, the state of Missouri, and 15 Kansas City, Missouri area school districts. Since current research demonstrates that the principal plays a critical role in the success or failure of improvement initiatives,…

The Plus 50 Initiative is a three-year initiative of the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), launched in June 2008 and funded by The Atlantic Philanthropies. It was created to support a pilot group of two-year institutions to develop or expand campus programs that engage plus 50 learners. The overarching goal of the Plus 50…

The American Association of Community Colleges' (AACC) Plus 50 Initiative is a three-year initiative launched in June 2008 and funded by The Atlantic Philanthropies. It was created to support a pilot group of two-year institutions to develop or expand campus programs that engage plus 50 learners. The initiative focuses on three types of…

Describes the procedure followed in evaluating extension at the University of Missouri, reporting on the usefulness of the steps followed, and presenting some of the outcomes from this Extension evaluation at the institutional level. (WL)

The American Association of Community Colleges' (AACC) Plus 50 Initiative is a three-year initiative launched in June 2008 and funded by The Atlantic Philanthropies. It was created to support a pilot group of two-year institutions to develop or expand campus programs that engage plus 50 learners. The initiative focuses on three types of…

The goal of this study is to apply a conventional education cost-function approach for estimating the sensitivity of cost models and predicted education costs to the inclusion of school district level racial composition variables and further to test whether race neutral alternatives sufficiently capture the additional costs associated with school…

A project was conducted to develop a model for evaluating local vocational education programs in Missouri. Concerns of the project were formation of evaluation criteria, development of standard statements and indicators to operationalize the system, and securement of expert consensus on the criteria and standards. A Project Advisory Committee…

Last fall, the National Center for Public Policy in Higher Education published the results of a five-state demonstration project aimed at developing common state-level benchmarks for student learning for its fifty-state report card, "Measuring Up." One of the instruments used in this Pew-funded project was the Collegiate Learning…

This paper presents a profile of Missouri's Quality Rating System prepared as part of the Child Care Quality Rating System (QRS) Assessment Study. The profile consists of several sections and their corresponding descriptions including: (1) Program Information; (2) Rating Details; (3) Quality Indicators for Center-Based Programs; (4) Indicators for…

A study reported on progress in developing statewide norm-referenced evaluation scales for high and middle school students. Phase IV goals were to develop and try out a guidance curriculum results evaluation survey format for use by local school district personnel and to explore ways to analyze and use Missouri School Improvement data to…

Cell phones afford a set of distinctive advantages for gathering information on daily patterns of behavior, establishing relationships, maintaining contact, and providing professional expertise to participants in a wide array of programs, including intervention, treatment, and service. This paper presents new findings about innovative applications…