E-portfolios are a rich, flexible tool for teaching, learning, and assessment. They provide institutions with a way to assess how well they are educating their students. However, it is important for institutions to know why e-portfolios are important learning and assessment tool for institutions both now and for the future. Higher education…

This action research study addresses the link between building evaluation capacity and enhancing evaluation use for learning. The author shares her experiences and reports on the evidence collected from a set of self-evaluation capacity-building interventions that she implemented. Using a mixed-method approach, the author first determined that the…

Using a set of scenarios derived from actual evaluation studies, this simulation study examines the reported influence of evaluation information on decision makers' potential actions. Each scenario described a context where one of three types of evaluation information (large-scale study data, case study data, or anecdotal accounts) is presented…

"The Program Evaluation Standards," established by 16 professional associations, identify evaluation principles that should result in improved program evaluations that address utility, propriety, feasibility, and accuracy. This digest summarizes these standards. Guidelines and illustrative cases to assist in meeting these standards are…

Papers in this collection explore alternative and nontraditional approaches to evaluation. They provide options, speculations, and propositions that affect each thinker's ideas on how to trace the impact of National Science Foundation-supported programs. Organized around a central theme of footprints as evidence of a program's impact, the papers…

Over the past 25 years, there has been a gradual recognition that counseling children and adolescents is much different than counseling adults. Because of this difference, numerous books, games, and articles have focused on what assessment and intervention strategies work with the child and adolescent population. However, many of these…

This paper proposes a model to establish which criteria are considered by stakeholders as valid for evaluating a program. The model is developed with the aim of increasing the credibility and use of evaluations. Stakeholders are involved in the identification of potential evaluation criteria, and ratings of validity and priority are used as the…

This book offers a comprehensive guide to evaluation as applied to management development. Part I (Chapters 1-2) discusses the following: what management is; the role of training, development, and education of managers; the purposes of evaluation (proving, improving, learning, controlling); and approaches to evaluation. Part II (Chapters 3-6)…

This book explores the key issues of learner assessment in terms of who it is for, what modes of assessment exist, what makes for sound assessment, why assessment is done, what agencies are promoting innovative methods of assessment, and the catalysts for change. Practical suggestions on how to assess more effectively are provided, including…

This study attempted to identify efforts to evaluate programs for gifted and talented students in 122 Texas school districts and to compare these practices with those recommended in the literature and with Texas Education Association guidelines. Areas examined included informal and formal assessment of student and teacher identification practices,…

Since educational criticism aims to reeducate teachers' perception in order to improve or illuminate educational practices, the audience's role is particularly important. In many ways, the intended audience determines the evidence presented. The evaluator must write the criticism in language which is meaningful to the audience (for example…

The ongoing activities of program evaluation in the College of Education at Michigan State University are described in terms of three major phases of the evaluation: data collection; data analysis and reporting; and internal program reviews. Descriptions are included of the Graduate and Undergraduate Education Policy Committees, Office of Program…

In this case study, the ways in which evaluation, the decision maker, and the change process influenced the use or non-use of federally mandated evaluations of vocational and technical programs were studied for Maryland since 1979. A Discrepancy Analysis was used to determine whether the intended benefits from evaluation implementation and…

This paper describes a structure for assessing the school evaluation use process developed from a longitudinal case study of districtwide and school level evaluation procedures in a large urban school district. Two fundamental questions guided the study: (1) Why isn't the evaluation process more useful to decision-makers and practitioners? and (2)…

This chapter addresses the problems encountered in the formative evaluation of instructional development projects and the instructional development process. Three types of formative evaluation--component, convergent, and contextual--are distinguished, and the consequences of using the wrong type of evaluation in a particular situation or project…