Current Trends in European pre-school research are documented with respect to types of pre-school programs, nature of family involvement, compensatory education approaches, diagnosis and assessment, action research and design, as well as recently emerging areas of pre-school research. (EH)

Because of the pressure towards immediate implementation of innovative educational programs, evaluation emphasis has been put on the overall effectiveness of these programs. This type of research yields only yes-no answers about general effectiveness without probing into the process of education itself. More research is needed on the factors that…

What are the four different types of questions of concern in an evaluation study and how can concept questions be recognized and answered? These issues are addressed in this paper, in the framework of a compensatory education program evaluation. The discussion includes (1) the identification of concept questions and how they are different from…

Planned Variation was deisgned as a three-year program to assess the implementation of prominent preschool curricula in Head Start and the immediate effects of the programs. Sites used were those in which the sponsor already had a Follow Through program; the research project lacked the necessary control over site characteristics. Consultants…

Until recently, anthropologists have had little involvement in the evaluation of social welfare and social change programs, despite the fact that such research involves not only the quantitative assessment of program results, but also analysis of informal structures and processes through which goals are formulated and results achieved. This paper…

Presents three categories of approaches to assess the impact of college supplemental instruction (SI) programs on an institution: anecdotal information; descriptive statistics; and inferential statistics. For SI programs required to justify their existence, these methods include a range of assessment devices from simple testimony to rigorous…

Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) has been recommended as one vehicle with which to evaluate special education and other intervention impacts (M. J. Taylor and M. S. Innocenti, 1993). Common misinterpretations of this methodology for these purposes are explained. These misapplications of ANCOVA include: (1) ignoring the assumption of homogeneity of…

This study's purpose was to develop and evaluate programs based on psycholinguistic theory for rural black disadvantaged 4-year-olds. The treatment conditions, administered in mobile labs, were (1) a 9-month general enrichment curriculum, GE (N=8 comparatively advantaged white children), (2) a 3-month structured Peabody curriculum, P3 (N=8…

Clarifies a general approach to understanding teaching effectiveness research, outlines the requirements of the kind of research that is believed likely to result in verified generalizations about the primary dimensions along which effective and ineffective teachers vary, and provides an example of the kind of research it is believed is needed.…

Problems encountered in large-scale educational evaluations are discussed using the evaluation of the Emergency School Aid Act as an example. This extensive article focuses primarily on methodological issues. (JKS)

Follow Through is a large compensatory education program that operated in scores of communities across the United States throughout the seventies. This study was conducted in an attempt to obtain a more definitive answer to whether different educational approaches actually lead to different achievement outcomes. (Authors/JN)

The project described herein represents an attempt by the U. S. Office of Education to take a more active role in the national dissemination and replication of those programs which have achieved the greatest success in producing reliably measured achievement benefits in reading and mathematical skills. With this general objective in mind, the U.…

Some of the problems unique to evaluation research, in particular to the evaluation of longitudinal studies of social programs, are presented. A working model found to be useful in structuring compensatory education program evaluation activities is also offered. Since the goals of social programs such as Head Start are dynamic rather than static,…

The work completed to date on the development and validation of a procedure for assessing the micro-environments of preschool children is summarized. It was speculated that the lack of evidence that compensatory programs facilitate developmental changes in children might be due to actual lack of influence by the programs, to the subtlety of the…