The development of European Community administrative authority has greatly influenced the development of an evaluation culture among the southern and central member states of the European Union. The present case study from Spain provides an example of this diffusion through the use of an empowerment evaluation approach to build evaluation capacity…

The Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) project is the most comprehensive effort thus far to ascertain which approaches help welfare recipients and other low-income people stay steadily employed and advance in their jobs. Launched in 1999 and slated to end in 2009, the ERA project encompasses more than a dozen demonstration programs and…

A province-wide evaluation of the new Comprehensive Guidance and Counseling Program undertaken in Nova Scotia provides strong support for a "program-based model" of counseling. Focus groups provided qualitative data related to counselors' overall impressions of the Program, what was working, concerns, and professional needs. Evaluation…

This report discusses one of the consistent problems in school counseling and guidance-that of furnishing concrete evidence concerning the effects of counseling and guidance activities on the development of children. The following causal factors are discussed: (1) the difficulty of pinning down abstractly stated goals in an operational manner at…

Reports on observations of the guidance and counseling services offered in nine schools in the San Francisco Unified School District, California. Provides a history of the development of these programs, discusses the role of the counselor, sets forth the expected tasks of the counselor while comparing these with the actual work being performed,…

In the late 1990s the Texas Education Agency advocated the transformation of all counseling services into developmental guidance programs. This document describes the process undertaken and the lessons learned when evaluating a small, rural school district in north Texas in order to begin this model transformation. The purpose of the study was to…

Reporting the effectiveness of Phase II of Portland's Career Guidance and Counseling project, this document presents the summative data documenting the goals, objectives, and participant attitudes toward the project. (Phase I centered on strategies to improve counseling staff involvement in cooperative efforts to upgrade career guidance and…

Outcomes of guidance can be assessed at these three levels: individual, where they are immediate; organizational, where they are intermediate; or societal, where they are ultimate. They may result in learning outcomes, school effectiveness, economic benefits, or social benefits. Various designs of outcome evaluation are described and…

In this final report, the demonstration project conducted by the Mesa schools from 1973 to 1976 is shown to have been successful in reaching its goals of staff training, information dissemination, and student benefits in developmental career guidance, counseling, and placement services for grades K-12. Student-related objectives which are listed…

The Programmatic Approach to Guidance Excellence (PAGE 2) Project produced staff development materials for the career guidance components of program planning, curriculum-based guidance, and job placement. These materials make up the PAGE 2 Instructional Resource Package, intended to be used as a planning program for a comprehensive career guidance…

Phase 1 evaluation results of a demonstration project in career education are summarized in this report. (The program was designed to meet established goals and objectives through a series of guidance units administered to students in the classroom by teachers as part of the regular curriculum. General conclusions and recommendations are reported…

This resource booklet contains an operational appraisal instrument for use in evaluating the program effectiveness of secondary school guidance and counseling activities. It first presents criteria for exemplary guidance programs, which form the basis for the evaluation. Program areas appraised by this instrument include philosophy and objectives,…