Draws on findings from evaluations of recent reform initiatives in Alabama, North Carolina, and Ohio to suggest that performance-measurement systems for state child-welfare programs must adapt to changing circumstances, especially when improvements in one area can influence standards and expectations in others. (Author/KB)

Describes how child well-being has been conceptualized and measured in research on family foster care, and discusses the essential dimensions that should be included in a useful measure of child well-being. Discusses challenges in incorporating measures of child well-being into ongoing evaluations of family foster care. (Author)

Faced with the absence of a conceptual framework and the terminology for establishing evaluation criteria in the substance abuse prevention services field, this special issue is devoted to exploring the topics of accountability and performance measures. It discusses the requisite components (i.e., theory, methodology, convention on terms, data)…

Describes the Template Project, which drew on the evaluation needs and techniques of service industries to create an evaluation instrument for distance education courses. Asserts that this method of evaluating distance education courses allows for students' perceptions of their programs to be identified and used. (EV)

Evaluation of initiatives for widening participation in higher education by nontraditional groups should avoid positivist, economic approaches in favor of participatory action research (PAR). An example from Britain shows how PAR finds local solutions for local problems; promotes empowerment, ownership, and sustainability; and bridges and…

Submits survey instruments on college student development used by Tinto, Astin, and Pace to five probes from recent social theory--voice, power, authenticity, self-reflexivity, and reconstitution--and proposes a shift in focus in student development research from essentialized categories like culture and race to relation and learning "between"…

Developed and tested the Social Work Self-Efficacy Scale, which assesses social workers' confidence regarding a broad range of social work tasks. Pre-post data from two cohorts of social work students showed significant positive change in MSW students' self-efficacy, suggesting a new approach to outcomes assessment in social work education. (EV)

Evaluates the equivalence of translated achievement tests administered to 4,400 English- and French-speaking sixth-graders. Items displaying differential item functioning were flagged using three statistical methods; results were relatively consistent across methods, but not identical. Substantive review of French items via back-translation to…

Reviews treatment acceptability measures and practices that have been developed and used to assess the social validity of behavioral interventions. Develops and applies a comparative framework to provide a systematic critique of nine treatment acceptability measures. No one instrument was selected to be the most comprehensive and it is argued that…

Looks at popular myths surrounding student evaluations of faculty and cites research that provides insight into what is known concerning student evaluations and their use. (EV)

A number of recent articles have claimed strong relationships--i.e., very high "proportions of shared variance"--between pairs of teaching and learning questionnaires. These claims have been the subject of debate and it has emerged that the proportion of shared variance is defined as the complement of Wilks' lambda. The present article argues that…

A key strength of latent curve analysis (LCA) is the ability to model individual variability in rates of change as a function of 1 or more explanatory variables. The measurement of time plays a critical role because the explanatory variables multiplicatively interact with time in the prediction of the repeated measures. However, this interaction…

The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale--Third Edition (WAIS-III; D. Wechsler, 1997a) and the Wechsler Memory Scale--Third Edition (WMS-III; D. Wechsler, 1997b) are 2 of the most frequently used measures in psychology and neuropsychology. To facilitate the diagnostic use of these measures in the clinical decision-making process, this article…

In tasks as diverse as stock market predictions and jury deliberations, a person's feelings of confidence in the appropriateness of different choices often impact that person's final choice. The current study examines the mathematical modeling of confidence calibration in a simple dual-choice task. Experiments are motivated by an accumulator…

This commentary reviews "Negotiating Researcher Roles in Ethnographic Program Evaluation" and discusses the changing field of evaluation. It situates postmodern deliberations in evaluation anthropology and ethnoevaluation, two concepts that explore the interdisciplinary merger in evaluation, ethnography, and anthropology. Reflecting on Hymes's…