Recent decades have witnessed a remarkable rise in the regulation of public services and servants, education being a case in point. External evaluation and inspection has been an important element of this trend. Increasingly, however as the limitations of external surveillance systems have become clear the concept of internal or self-evaluation…

Career development practitioners understand that the value of career and employment services extends beyond attachment to the labor market. However, "soft" outcomes such as increased self-efficacy and improved ability to manage transitions are difficult to measure. Convincing funders and policy makers of the significance of such outcomes…

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 purpose of this research is to provide additional empirical evidence supporting the use of both a multidimensional profile and an overall evaluation of teaching effectiveness as valid indicators of student perceptions of effective classroom instruction. A factor analytic teaching evaluation instrument was used that also included open-ended…

The article reports on and discusses findings from a project to investigate students' perceptions and understandings of creativity as an assessment criterion within a specific context within the higher education curriculum. The study found that, although students were familiar with creativity as a requirement of course assessments across a great…

Involvement of students and adult employees into the decisions that affect their education and employment can improve their transition into supported employment. One means for increasing involvement into these decisions is to gain their input into performance evaluations and support needs. The "Job Observation and Behavior Scale: Opportunity for…

This article reviews issues involved with using norm-referenced measures within an intervention validity model. Methodological examination of intervention validity has become more important as intervention methodologies have become part of federal legislation. However, current practice and federal guidelines often implicitly portray a dichotomy…

The pilot research project reported on here was conducted between October 2005 and March 2006 on one campus of one of Ontario's 24 colleges. The college is located in an urban centre in southern Ontario. The main focus of this pilot study was the exploration of issues of accessibility and accommodation for students with disabilities as they engage…

This article explores whether focus groups can constitute a culturally sensitive method of data gathering for educational leadership, management and related areas in a Gulf-Arab cultural context. Reviewing the literature on focus groups and cross-cultural psychology for the Arab region, it identifies key notions related to societal values such as…

The authors discuss how to use economic techniques to evaluate educational programs and show how to apply basic cost analysis to implementation of school-wide positive behavior support (SWPBS). A description of cost analysis concepts used for economic program evaluation is provided, emphasizing the suitability of these concepts for evaluating…

Both spatial theories of voting and our intuitions lead us to expect that political parties' ideological positions should affect individuals' turnout decisions. Contrary to these expectations, existing research finds that neither feelings of alienation--that no party adequately represents an individual's ideological position--nor…

Background: There is an urgent need for developing reliable, valid and practical instruments that assess and classify the support needed by persons with disability to function in their chosen living, working and social environments. I-CAN is an instrument that addresses the frequency and level of support needed (not individual skills or deficits)…

This article discusses the significant contributions of Peter H. Rossi to the field of program evaluation. It was the publication of "Evaluation: A Systematic Approach" by Peter Rossi, Howard Freeman, and Sonia Rosenbaum in 1979 that most emphatically marked the point at which program evaluation had clearly consolidated as a distinct field of…

Research about the effectiveness of different types of feedback in programmed instruction was investigated. Knowledge of results had the least data to support its efficacy. Knowledge of correct responding (KCR) has been shown to be effective in several studies. Elaboration feedback is more effective than KCR, but may require more time of the…

N. Stewart, G. D. A. Brown, and N. Chater presented a relative judgment model (RJM) of absolute identification, in which the current stimulus is judged relative to the preceding stimulus. S. Brown, A. A. J. Marley, and Y. Lacouture found that the RJM does not predict their finding of increased accuracy after large stimulus jumps, except at the…