A year-long case study of the effects of an educational and vocational rehabilitation program in a youth training center was discussed in terms of fourteen issues which might threaten the validity of an evaluation or research project. This correctional institution housed women aged 14 to 21 who were long-term wards of the state, held on remand, or…

Rather than automatically presuming explicit conditions exist when designing an evaluation to fit the summative or formative mold, evaluators should think of an evaluation design as fitting between endpoints on an evaluation process continuum. Evaluators can blend techniques from both the formative and summative evaluation, matching actual program…

Two innovative methods for collecting and analyzing qualitative data are vignettes and pre-structured cases. Vignettes are descriptions of situations or problems written by a professional, with a suggested outline and comments provided by a researcher. Advantages of this method are strength of impact of the written descriptions and efficiency of…

The general decline in public resources has encouraged government agencies to consolidate job functions, and the internal program evaluator is becoming a scarce commodity. This paper briefly describes a case study about the circumstances and implications of merging two formally antagonistic job roles: program administrator and program evaluator.…

Using a qualitative approach, documents were reviewed and teachers, peer evaluators, instructional supervisors, and administrators were interviewed in order to evaluate the effectiveness of peer evaluation programs in three school districts. Specifically, this study examines peer involvement in the summative evaluation of teachers in three school…

The study reported in this paper builds upon earlier research designed to examine issues associated with initiating an effective teacher evaluation effort and integrating it into district practices. The paper describes four districts which have made substantial progress in initiating and organizing teacher evaluation programs and presents the view…