This qualitative case study seeks to understand what 'participatory' in participatory monitoring and evaluation means in an international development context. The objective is to identify the characteristics of a participatory monitoring and evaluation process, according to experts and specialists in the field. The paper seeks to highlight the…

The development of transversal competences is essential for the success of engineers, who need to have the ability to adapt to the new and changing demands posed by modern society and scientific advances. It is a challenge for professors to teach and evaluate transversal competences, since such competences are related to attitudes and values. We…

Classification evaluation metrics are often used to evaluate adaptive tutoring systems-- programs that teach and adapt to humans. Unfortunately, it is not clear how intuitive these metrics are for practitioners with little machine learning background. Moreover, our experiments suggest that existing convention for evaluating tutoring systems may…

In response to increasingly vigorous and vocal criticism of American education, the author proposes a new model for curriculum development--a double triad that would combine the traditional cooperative efforts of administrators, teachers, and school board members with involvement of the community, parents, and students. The author suggests…

Shows how to bridge the gap between collaborative evaluations with extensive stakeholder participation and noncollaborative evaluations in which stakeholders do not participate to a great degree. Synthesizes research that shows that interaction with stakeholders helps enhance validity in noncollaborative evaluations. (SLD)

A positive approach to advancing educational equity across a district is to see educational equity as a school-level problem that requires planned change. The success of such an approach depends on the care taken to define educational equity. The definition must encompass three characteristics: a sense of construct validity, preciseness, and…

The Title I Evaluation and Reporting System (TIERS), a part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, provides models for uniform evaluation procedures and criteria to be used by local and state agencies and aggregated into a cohesive Federal report. The report of data collected from 56 states and territories to the U. S. Department…

In this paper, the author describes a game that is played by the school administration, faculty, staff, students, and parents in order to improve a school curriculum. The game gives all persons interested in the school an opportunity to "purchase" the kind of education they feel is needed. A player is given 20 Play money bills, each in the…

Issues associated with involvement of social program participants in program evaluation are analyzed. Although there seems to be a broad consensus of the need for participatory evaluation, the proposed rationales and concomitant benefits to evaluation practice appear to be quite diverse. Key issues include the rationale for "stakeholder"…

Provides perspective on the increasing involvement of young people in community evaluation research, identifies participation patterns and evaluation roles of young people, and draws conclusions from empirically based practice. (SLD)

Adult participation at the Early Childhood Research Center (ECRC) of the State University of New York at Buffalo is described in this paper. Five different programs serving families with infants, toddlers, and children 3 and 4 years old are briefly described to illustrate the complexity of program coordination at ECRC. The roles of staff teaching,…

Analyzed are five problem areas hampering the provision of qualtiy day care services to preschool children. The five areas are seen to include definitional problems (including confusion over funding source requirements) lack of program evaluation data, noncontinuity of programing, curriculum difficulties, and underutilization of parent input.…

Provides an overview of practical methods and tools for assessment planning and implementation for service learning and civic engagement projects conducted by colleges and universities. Offers suggestions to help readers design their own program assessment plans. (SLD)

This study investigated the effectiveness of a preventive multimodal school-based program designed for the development of prosocial behavior in kindergarten children. Because the theoretical orientation was preventative and ecologically based, the Kindergarten Intervention Project (KIP) involved components for teacher support, parent involvement,…

Describes a method that uses program participants' compliance with program instructions as a means of classifying participants and in that way obtains a randomized control group for a subset of participants. Illustrates two variations of the method through a large smoking-intervention project. (SLD)