The skills that culinary school graduates gain from the curriculum do not align with the culinary industry requirements for their first position. This problem, if not addressed, will lead to lower enrollment of students and a limited number of employed culinary arts graduates in California. This basic qualitative study aimed to explore California…

The STEM Public Outreach Team (SPOT) at the University of Washington Bothell (UWB) provides training and community building opportunities for diverse STEM students that impact their persistence in STEM majors and careers. The University of Washington Center for Evaluation and Research for STEM Equity (CERSE) evaluated the experiences of SPOT…

Assessing the quality of education is a vital stipulation for all graduate programs that aim to secure and bolster their current rank among similar programs. Program evaluation is usually carried out by parties not directly related to a program. In other words, outsiders evaluate programs. Insiders who have first-hand experiences and impressions…

This article focuses on teachers' perceptions of the implementation and impact in Portuguese schools of a wide-ranging and long-term reading promotion programme. The Portuguese National Reading Plan (PNRP) was a public policy initiative whose purpose was to increase literacy levels and reading habits among the population. The Plan identified…

This exploratory case study applied a formative evaluation framework to evaluate the no-fee teacher education program at Southwest University. The study focused on the students' perspective and their perceptions of the program, both intrinsic and extrinsic. A self-evaluation checklist and a questionnaire were the instruments used to collect data.…

The study sought to explore the impact of the commitment and political will exhibited by the Government of Zimbabwe through the Presidential Scholarship Scheme in promoting regionalisation of higher education. The methodology employed document analysis, interviews and questionnaires to gather data from the stakeholders. The officials responsible…

This paper reports on the findings of a pilot school-based professional development programme for Tanzanian primary school teachers launched in February 2011 and evaluated in December 2012 by the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training with the support of UNICEF. The study set out to investigate the effectiveness and efficiency of the pilot…

The prevalence of autism locally and globally is significant. The Autism Foundation of the Carolina's (AFC) recognized the need to fill a gap in services to families coping with autism, while educating future professionals about the condition and its effect on families. The purpose of the mixed-methods, participant-oriented, participatory study…

Programme evaluation is essential for quality assurance in education. In this paper, we describe our evaluation strategy for the first year of a new medical programme. Although we used multiple methods in the evaluation, the use of the focus group method was core. This paper reports our experiences of focus groups for this purpose. We describe the…

The aim of this study is to improve the subsequent editions of an international training program in information management. Up to now 15 editions have been organized, coordinated by the author of this paper. Most participants work in developing countries, mainly in Africa and Asia. Each program takes place mainly in Brussels, Belgium, for about…

Numerous studies have assessed the benefits that students and employers gain from participating in and supporting internship programs. Assessment of the benefits that marketing departments receive from supporting internship programs has largely been neglected. This study aims to address this gap by examining the responses of 180 colleges of…

Exit interviews of university graduating seniors have been used to a very limited extent when evaluating academic programs. It is our belief that developing and implementing an exit interview plan stimulates faculty dialog and improves ongoing feedback for department program assessment. From 2001 to 2007, the Accounting Department at Towson…

The Ohio PSEO Program is a legislated dual enrollment curricular offering. The program provides higher educational courses that are also credited at the high school and funded at state expense for qualifi ed students. Although individual and institutional benefits of the program abound (i.e., accelerated postsecondary completion, decreased…

A part-time degree programme has been run at the Liverpool John Moores University, formerly Liverpool Polytechnic, for some 20 years without any systematic attempt to evaluate its effects on students. An evaluation was begun by focusing on graduates of the programme who entered between 1992 and 1994 and continued with recent part-time students.…

This survey examines the perceptions of students enrolled in one or more independent-study courses offered by the Division of Independent Study of the National University Continuing Education Association. The survey's purpose was to determine students' attitudes, opinions, and perceptions toward correspondence instruction and to determine the need…