The influences within the Ontario educational system perceived by teachers, department heads, and principals as affecting their evaluation policies and practices were studied. Interviews were conducted in the 1987-88 school year as part of the Ecology of Evaluation research project conducted in Ontario and British Columbia. About 50 elementary and…

This report describes a project undertaken at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) between January 1, 1982 and March 31, 1984, which was designed to increase the use in program assessment and in program improvement of information derived from measures of: (1) student achievement in general education; (2) student achievement in the major…

The politics of program evaluation are discussed from the personal perspective of the Director of the General Accounting Office's Program Evaluation and Methodology Division, which has produced reports for committees of the United States Congress. It is concluded that successful evaluations must be useful to others and must understand the…

This paper discusses the experiences and insight derived from the 1985-1986 Statewide Evaluation of the Early Education Program of Handicapped Children in Louisiana, the multimethod evaluation of preschool intervention projects for handicapped and at-risk children. The program served almost 5,000 handicapped preschoolers and their parents,…

Views of the chief academic officers at Minnesota colleges concerning assessment were surveyed. Responses were received from 17 private colleges, 5 University of Minnesota campuses, 7 state universities, 18 community colleges, and 33 area vocational-technical institutes. For each type of institution, survey results are presented concerning: the…

This paper examines possible explanations for the fact that evaluation results are rarely used. Most explanatory factors for use of results in decision making mentioned in the literature have been clustered in three categories of variables. They concern: (1) the making of decisions about the practical problem; (2) the way in which evaluation is…

The High Level Seminar on Educational Achievement in Asia and the Pacific was organized in collaboration with the UNESCO Regional Office for Education in Asia and the Pacific (Bangkok, Thailand). The objectives were to exchange information and experiences on educational assessment at the primary and secondary school levels; to review major…

This manual, which is provided as a resource for Illinois School Districts and which incorporates some of the materials in the Alaska Department of Education's Assessment Handbook, is designed to meet the requirements of Public Act 84-126 and to help practitioners develop student assessment plans of local usefulness. Areas covered in the…

A common weakness characteristic of many instructional programs is that little advance planning is devoted to evaluation. The first stage of formulating and operationalizing an evaluation plan for the Iowa-Undergraduate Pre-Service Science Teacher Education Program (Iowa-UPSTEP) was to locate two external evaluators possessing experience and…

This collection of essays by current or former directors of institutional research represents the broad spectrum of size, function, and geography within institutional research in the two-year college. The volume contains: (1) "The Role of Institutional Research in Evaluation of Nontraditional Programs: College Preparatory Analysis at Miami-Dade…

An analytic procedure, efficiency analysis, is proposed for improving the utility of quantitative program evaluation for decision making. The three features of the procedure are explained: (1) for statistical control, it adopts and extends the regression-discontinuity design; (2) for statistical inferences, it de-emphasizes hypothesis testing in…

This proposal is predicated on the assumption that in order to improve instruction, formative assistance must be conceptually separated from summative evaluation. Teacher improvement requires the involvement of other teachers, department chairs, students, parents, and administrators, whereas summative evaluation is separate from the growth process…

This is one of a series of reports based on an ongoing reality test of systemic evaluation for instructional decision making. This feasibility study is being carried out by the Center for the Study of Evaluation with the Laboratory in School and Community Relations at a suburban Los Angeles high school (called Site A). Viewing a school as a…

Factors associated with the use of program evaluation results are examined. Evaluation can serve a variety of educational management needs if (1) these needs are organized around a central concern, and if (2) stakeholders use evaluation information so that their decision making resolves the central concern. (GDC)

Graduate students simulated school board members making decisions about educational programs. Situation contexts within the program evaluation reports were varied by conflict, quality, and time. The quality of decisions affected support for program continuation. Interactions of conflict and quality affected need for more information and more time…