More and more researchers, evaluators, and policy makers are recognizing that in order to best understand the factors precipitating, supporting, and prohibiting intimate violence against women, we must often gather information directly from battered women themselves. Such data collection, however, is not without its risks to the women involved in…

The authors examined the effects of maternal depression on the skillfulness of toddlers' self-assertive strategies in interactions with their mother and with a female examiner. The participants were 110 mothers and their 26-month-old toddlers. Of these mothers, 57 had experienced an episode of clinical depression sometime since their child's…

The Ethical Challenges scenario in the June 2004 issue of the American Journal of Evaluation focused on an evaluator-client disagreement concerning the wisdom of having consumer representation on a steering committee that would help plan and oversee an evaluation in an agency providing community-based residential services to the chronically…

Typically, program evaluation agencies in the legislative branch of state government examine programs that have already been implemented. These evaluations often consider whether a program achieved the legislature's original goals or complied with statutory requirements. Program evaluations frequently determine whether executive branch agencies…

The purpose of this guide is to provide clear, practical advice on reporting the results of an evaluation of an educational program or practice ("intervention"). Specifically, this is a guide for researchers, and those who sponsor and use research, to reporting the results of "impact" studies--that is, studies that evaluate the…

The American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC), comprising 34 American Indian tribally controlled colleges and universities, has undertaken a comprehensive effort to develop an "Indigenous Framework for Evaluation" that synthesizes Indigenous ways of knowing and Western evaluation practice. To ground the framework, AIHEC engaged…

This checklist is based on "Evaluation Criteria for SREB-SCORE Learning Objects" and is designed to help schools and colleges determine the quality and effectiveness of learning objects. It is suggested that each learning object be rated to the extent to which it meets the criteria and the SREB-SCORE definition of a learning object. A learning…

Conducting scientifically rigorous evaluations of character education interventions is complex. This evaluation guide is presented as a resource primarily for project directors who are federal grantees embarking on an evaluation of a character education intervention, although it contains useful information that can benefit other education…

Over the past twenty years several topics covered in "New Directions for Evaluation" (NDE) are relevant to underrepresented groups, including cultural sensitivity; cultural competence; stakeholder-based, responsive, democratic deliberation; and participatory evaluation theories, methodologies, and practices. Also, the topic of social justice and…

Findings from a study of Illinois' educational evaluation process, in which external evaluators conduct the evaluation, are presented in this paper. Methodology involved analysis by State Board of Education staff of requests for proposals (RFPs); these were mailed to 121 potential bidders for external evaluation. Bidders included universities,…

The L statistic of E. B. Page (1963) tests the agreement of a single group of judges with an a priori ordering of alternative treatments. This paper extends the two group test of D. W. Leitner and C. M. Dayton (1976), an extension of the L test, to analyze difference in consensus between two unequally sized groups of judges. Exact critical values…

The psychometric objections to using essays and other subjective tests for measurement can be overcome by a many-facet Rasch model. This model enables judge-awarded grades to be transformed from their arbitrary, local, non-linear rating scale form into linear measures with explicit generalizable meaning of specifiable reliability (standard error)…

Several issues relating to agreement estimates for different types of data from performance evaluations are considered. New indices of agreement are presented for ordinal level items and for summative scores produced by nominal or ordinal level items. Two sets of empirical data illustrate the performance of the two formulas derived to estimate…

Using architectural design as a model, the article discusses the process of evaluation design. Like the architect, the evaluator faces a problem of finding forms that best fit a partially defined set of contextual demands. The context is the set of all factors which made demands upon the final design form. Like the architect, the evaluator's…

The Service Delivery Assessment (SDA) model is a human services evaluation tool which offers a viable alternative to more traditional approaches and is appropriate for small local evaluations as well as large national studies. There are five phases to an SDA study: assignment, pre-assessment, design, analysis, and communication of the findings.…