This report examines the National Institute of Education's (NIE's) Request for Proposals (RFP) entitled "Summative Evaluation of the Response to Educational Needs Project (RENP)." The first of six evaluation tasks, Task O, called for the contractor to verify that the questions selected as important were in fact the most important…

A historical survey of the origins of formative evaluation techniques for film and television reveals that: (1) most of the methodologies for formative evaluation of film and television that are in use today had appeared in one form or another by 1940; (2) before 1940, evaluation was generally understood as qualitative judgement of the worth of an…

This report describes activities related to establishing and providing technical assistance to nine new state Individually Guided Education (IGE) networks, providing technical assistance to fourteen state IGE networks operating prior to July 1974, conducting fifteen leadership workshops and establishing four regional IGE institutes. Attention is…

This paper reports the findings of an attempt to improve test-wiseness (TW) through direct instruction in selected test-taking strategies. TW was defined as "a cognitive function, subject to improvement through both general exposure to a wide variety of test items, and specific training in test-taking skills." The total investigation included:…

Alternatives in schools and alternatives to schools are placed within a broad social, historical, and philosophical context by six authors. The first section contains (1) a typology of educational alternatives, (2) several perspectives on educational alternatives related to a model of culture, (3) a range of conceptualizing alternatives within a…

The purpose is to codify some program evaluation principles and provide a framework for program evaluation practices. Specifically: (1) common evaluation purposes are listed along with the general methods of investigation most apt for each purpose; (2) types of sources of evidence are listed and are associated with general methods of…

The purposes of the project described in this report were to train curriculum specialists and to develop and test curriculum design training materials. The first phase of the project included the development of training materials and their use to train a small group of students. During the training of the pilot group of students, an effective…

The first part of this manuscript relates the initial efforts of a teacher who attempted to apply the value clarification approach in an eighth grade social studies class. The approach is based on Louis Rath's seven-part approach to values clarification which encourages children to choose and to prize one's beliefs and behaviors, and to act on…

Prime indicators for realistic short term/long term project goals are budgets and timetables. Concrets, identifiable objects are useful in separating eloquent rhetoric from actual promises. Similarly, an external evaluator should be able to separate proposals with intentional misrepresentation of funding and goals from those which need further…

This chapter is limited to a discussion of formative evaluation procedures for the purpose of improving instructional programs. It provides some discussion about what formative evaluation is, what it is for, and some guidelines regarding how to go about the evaluation of instruction. The use of the term "instruction" is construed very broadly to…

This article summarizes the systematic process of instructional development by breaking down the three major stages of instructional analysis, design, and formative evaluation into the steps of needs analysis, learner analysis, task analysis, concept analysis, specification of instructional requirements, and the statement of instructional…

Each quarterly issue of this journal, available free to professional educators, discusses topics in educational evaluation by presenting articles on evaluation theory, procedures, methodologies, or practices. The topic of the six articles in this newsletter is an examination of free evaluation (GFE). Michael Scriven discusses the role of goal free…

An evaluation design created to provide information for a multiple-project program of educational experimentation is presented. Project SEED (State Experimentation in Educational Development) became an official education effort in North Carolina on July 1, 1971. Model for the program was that of the State's ESEA Title III program with certain…

The followup study reported here is a supplement to the process evaluation of the 1971-72 multiunit school organization/individually guided education (MUSE/IGE) nationwide installation effort by the Wisconsin Research and Development Center. The major purpose of the followup study was to determine basic implementation status in a number of schools…

This paper focuses on the development and/or improvement of instruments that can be used to measure the competence of preservice teacher education students. A number of questions need to be considered before making decisions concerning the development and improvement of such instruments: (1) At what level of specificity are the competencies to be…