Compared a professional foster-care program and two specialized programs in Cook County, Illinois, with kinship and nonrelative-family foster homes. Found that professional and kinship foster care consistently outperformed specialized and nonrelative care in stability, sibling placement, care restrictiveness, and proximity to child's community of…

Evidence from the Boston Renaissance Charter School suggests that the Edison Project is struggling fitfully to learn school management. Reliance on suspension and physical restraints demonstrates Edison Project's lack of experience with inner-city children. Test scores are up, but faculty are warring over school mission, teachers are struggling to…

Describes the development of the University of Guelph Child Care and Learning Centre, a collaborative program for integrating child care services with undergraduate learning opportunities and research. Summarizes the history, contextual factors, and guiding principles for the model, and the first-year evaluation results. Illustrates how contextual…

Data from 1,548 Women, Infants, Children clients showed that 93% found nutrition education valuable. A process-oriented evaluation of 494 clients using a skills inventory, and 513 using self-efficacy measures, identified topics they knew most and least about. Clients in facilitated discussion groups scored highest in self-efficacy compared with…

Provides a historical and current overview of staff-development program models in higher education. Traces the establishment of the Ball State University division of student affairs staff-development program as a model in staff-development design and functional-program services. Discusses methods of evaluation, issues, and trends. Provides…

Six voluntary continuing-education programs for long-term-care staff on mental health experienced high attrition, attributed to scheduling difficulties and staff turnover. Because attrition affects evaluation and behavioral outcomes, self-contained, short instructional units were recommended. (SK)

One method for ensuring quality in continuing training is self-assessment by trainers and trainees, which requires certain qualities in the subject and the environment. Self-assessment complements, and is complemented by, external evaluation. (SK)

Participants were college fraternity men (N=155) who were in either a pretested and posttested rape-prevention program, a posttested rape-prevention program, or an untreated control group. Significant declines in rape myth acceptance and behavioral intent to rape were shown among program participants regardless of whether they were pretested.…

Examines the perceptions of sixth- through ninth-grade students (N=719) concerning evaluation of substance-abuse-prevention strategies. School-based programs were rated as significantly more effective on six prevention objectives than were television ads, testimonials by famous people, billboards, and print ads displayed on public transportation.…

Investigated attitude changes resulting from the Child Development Associate (CDA) program, a competency-based teacher-education program to prepare early childhood personnel to maintain a state of harmonious relations with children through mutual affection and sympathetic understanding. Program participants' responses to the Minnesota Teacher…

Nebraska's plan for comprehensively evaluating school health programs used the Targeting Outcomes of Program framework to measure impact indicators of such programs. Following focus group meetings with stakeholders in one rural school district, the plan was developed and implemented as a statewide evaluation of comprehensive school health…

Describes the Diversity News Program, which trains University of Washington journalism students to produce stories on higher education from a diversity perspective. Finds most diversity journalism was centered on race and ethnicity, thus overlooking other issues; background information about diversity themes was provided in the majority of…

Advocates alternative staff development via the Authentic Professional Development (APD) model, suggesting that teachers trained under this model are more likely to actually bring new strategies and techniques into the classroom and use them effectively. Research comparing the APD model to traditional inservice training found the APD was very…

Explores issues in evaluating exemplary programs, including the measurement of the degree to which the program is exemplary or promising. Suggests that comparison (control) group analysis can mislead researchers about the effectiveness of a program and suggests the use of gain scores to identify exemplary programs. (SLD)

This theme issue provides a summary of six evaluations of home-visiting models that have been implemented nationally. These model programs represent home-visiting programs across the country that help parents provide children with the best start in life. (SLD)