With increased pressure on programs to evaluate outcomes, the issue of evaluation in social work has never been so topical. In response to these pressures, there has been a growing interest in evidence-based practice and strategies for the evaluation of social work programs. The American Evaluation Association (AEA) is an international…

E. Paul Torrance, a pioneer in creative education, and his associates founded the Future Problem Solving Program (now FPSPI, or Future Problem Solving Program International) in the mid-1970s as a competitive, interscholastic program and as a curriculum project integrating creative problem-solving and future studies. Since its founding, the program…

Several years ago, when the author was associate dean in the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, a new senior administrator on campus expressed the view that one of their premier first-year experience programs in the college was too expensive and that a different model, based on an approach taken at the administrator's previous…

Existing studies of reentry programs in the United States focus on the successes and failures of reentering offenders when compared to matched reentering offenders who did not receive structured reentry services. Little attention has been focused solely on the reentry participants themselves, and on how the level of program exposure may be related…

When one considers sustainability as a moral action, there are equally complex realities at hand--climate change, resource depletion, water and land rights. One author describes this broad sense of sustainability as "the connection of specific social and environmental problems to the functioning of human and ecological systems" (Jenkins, 2011).…

Determining the worth and effectiveness of training used within a military environment is the same accountability responsibility that educational organizations, businesses, and social agencies are charged with for improving programs and services to society. The need for accountability implies the process of evaluation, particularly in governmental…

In this article, the authors argue that poetry provides a valuable if overlooked resource to the organizational behavior professor. The authors describe a workshop designed to evoke students' innate poetic metaphors to enable a more lively engagement with course material. Because many of students' personal, private, and emotionally charged…

Singapore is a young island nation with a diverse population. Its support for young children at risk has its roots in the 1950s, but early childhood intervention (ECI) programs for young children with disabilities emerged only in the 1980s. ECI programs have proliferated in the subsequent years, offering an increasing range of service delivery…

The Safe Schools/Healthy Students (SS/HS) national evaluation seeks to assess both the implementation process and the results of the SS/HS initiative, exploring factors that have contributed to or detracted from grantee success. Each site is required to forge partnerships with representatives from education, mental health, juvenile justice, and…

Amid efforts to improve performance and constrain spending, federal agencies are being asked to expand the use of rigorous program evaluation in decision-making. In addition to performance data, indepth program evaluation studies are often needed for assessing program impact or designing improvements. Agencies can also use their evaluation…

In this paper the authors present a new method for sample selection for scale-up experiments. This method uses propensity score matching methods to create a sample that is similar in composition to a well-defined generalization population. The method they present is flexible and practical in the sense that it identifies units to be targeted for…

Early learning standards have been articulated in an effort to improve and create cohesion between and within informal and formal learning environments for young children. To fulfill these goals, early learning standards need to be implemented in a manner that is: (1) tailored to the variable nature of early childhood development, (2) adapted for…

Youth mentoring can be an effective way of supporting troubled youth, helping them sustain positive mental health, cope with stress, and lead successful lives through adolescence and into adulthood. This book is a comprehensive guide to youth mentoring programmes, illustrating how, if managed well, they can increase the social support available to…

This article describes three challenges encountered during a developmental evaluation and explains how these were addressed from the evaluators' perspective. The evaluation was conducted to support the implementation of a three-year educational technology leadership project funded by the Alberta provincial government. The developmental evaluation…

Program and/or course evaluation is, in fact, one of the essential aspects of any curriculum. It is a kind of quality control in which various aspects of an instructional program are explored. Program evaluation is an attempt in which different elements of a given curriculum are scrutinized in depth. To this end, an evaluator makes every effort to…