Examined the usefulness of British Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) reports for educational improvement. After a pilot examination of 21 OFSTED reports, examined the scalar judgments of 11 reports in detail. Findings indicate that the inspection reports are weak and questionable products, not a good base for developing school improvement…

Advice for adventure-based counseling (ABC) programs seeking funding includes setting realistic goals, designing an evaluation that matches program resources, and keeping it simple. Low recidivism is most important to grantors. Published research on ABC is scarce, but on-site process research generates useful data, and local schools and agencies…

Proposes and evaluates a method to test for mediation in multilevel data sets formed when an intervention administered to groups is designed to produce change in individual mediator and outcome variables. Applies the method to the ATLAS intervention designed to decrease steroid use among high school football players. (SLD)

Describes the 1995-1997 evaluation framework and activities of an evaluation of HIV-prevention efforts. This framework is offered as a platform for future efforts to determine the most effective ways to prevent HIV transmission, and it may be generalizable to other disease-prevention and health-promotion programs. (SLD)

Describes the evaluation of the Fighting Back initiative, in which communities across the country receive funding to combat alcohol and drug use. The evaluation has been designed to be responsive to national policy agendas and local community contextual differences so that it yields important insights at both levels. (Author/SLD)

Presents various options for schools to consider when shopping for education reform approaches. The Social Research and Demonstration Corporation was established to identify and test social programs and innovative social policy ideas that can improve the wellbeing of disadvantaged Canadians. Examples are presented of random assignment evaluations…

Describes an initiative designed to help public health managers in Ontario, Canada, improve their knowledge and skills in program evaluation. The initiative involved the development of a self-directed Program Evaluation Tool Kit and an accompanying workshop. Lists five principles of the tool kit. (SLD)

Refutes Gilliam et al.'s critique regarding the Comprehensive Child Development Program (CCDP) evaluation, including issues related to randomization, dropout rates, timing of evaluation, and services for control families. Discusses the broader issues regarding the appropriate interpretation of results of large-scale randomized trials of complex…

Evaluates the violence prevention effects of The Peacemakers Program , a school-based intervention. The program includes a primary prevention component delivered by teachers and a remedial component implemented by school psychologists and counselors. Results reveal significant, positive program effects on six of the seven variables assessed,…

Discusses the steps to ensure that assessment leads to genuine improvement: (1) agreeing on goals based on recognized standards; (2) establishing yearly objectives that help meet those goals; (3) developing a formal method for reporting the attainment of those objectives; and (4) using the assessment of the program as a part of the media…

Identifies 11 important questions administrators should seek answers to before implementing K-12 online education courses. The questions cover such topics as online course design, instructional methodology, instructor qualifications, content quality, student assessment, technology and infrastructure, compatibility with local school, and evidence…

Client satisfaction measures are an essential component of program evaluation. This article describes the development of a scale for measuring the satisfaction levels of parents whose children have received foster care services. Subjected to various statistical measures, the Parent Satisfaction with Foster Care Services Scale appears to be a…

Since the 1997 Dearing Report, generic skills development has become an essential part of higher education in the UK. Generic skills programmes are, in the main, either run in parallel with existing curricula or "embedded" within them. In 1993 the General Medical Council introduced student selected components (SSCs) into the UK medical…

Increasingly, "collaboration" between business, non-profit, health and educational agencies is being championed as a powerful strategy to achieve a vision otherwise not possible when independent entities work alone. But the definition of collaboration is elusive and it is often difficult for organizations to put collaboration into practice and…

The conventional way to measure program impacts is to compute the average treatment effect; that is, the difference between a treatment group that received some intervention and a control group that did not. Recently, scholars have recognized that looking only at the average treatment effect may obscure impacts that accrue to subgroups. In an…