The Indiana University Kokomo (IUK) School of Education (SOE) collaborates with 38 school districts in the North Central Indiana region in the Clinical Educational Partnership (CEP). The purpose of the CEP is to allow P-12 administrators and teachers to give input on the SOE's program development initiatives. Education students engage in practicum…

Assessment in higher education is a complex path to navigate, with unexpected twists and turns. Although many studies project the positive outcomes of assessment for learning, the outcomes do not always match the intention. Even when formative assessment is well-planned, the implementation may take such a toll, leaving a lecturer physically…

The value of a program can be understood as referring not only to outcomes, but also to how those outcomes compare to the types and amounts of resources expended to produce the outcomes. Major potential mistakes and biases in assessing the worth of resources consumed, as well as the value of outcomes produced, are explored. Most of these occur…

Digital video is used to capture and assess a wide range of everyday classroom teaching practices. Generally, these applications are informal in nature and considered either risk-free or risk-neutral by teachers. Increasingly, however, captured video can be scrutinized and assessed by "others" to determine the presence and/or quality of specific…

Early education has been a growing priority for the Obama administration, and its competitive funding is spurring innovation in this field around the country. In 2013, early education journalist Paul Nyhan, author of this report, conducted case studies of four competitive grant programs that are triggering changes in early education: "Race to…

Despite a wealth of tacit knowledge in academia regarding effective teaching strategies and a rich theoretical and empirical knowledge base on student learning, social work instructors wishing to identify appropriate ways to measure teaching and learning have little evidence to guide them. This article presents a framework for assessment of…

There's a war of sorts going on within the normally staid assessment industry, and it's a war over the definition of a type of assessment that many educators understand in only a sketchy fashion. Formative assessments, also known as "classroom assessments," are in some ways easier to define by what they are not. They're not like the long,…

A long-held ambition for many educators and assessment experts has been to integrate summative and formative assessments so that data from external assessments used for system monitoring may also be used to shape teaching and learning in classrooms. In turn, classroom-based assessments may provide valuable data for decision makers at school and…

The Case of Top Beginnings and the Missing Child Outcomes is a fictionalized case study of a set of evaluation challenges faced in evaluating comprehensive initiatives that are seeking to build systems. In this case, the issue is a multistate foundation-funded early learning system building initiative that has to date primarily employed a case…

Quality assurance in instructional development demands an exhaustive formative evaluation effort and applied testing. Unfortunately, this process is expensive and requires large numbers of user testers with characteristics similar to the intended audience. This article presents a procedure for increasing the efficiency of quality assurance efforts…

Although the need for evaluation of prevention programs is clear, the implementation of evaluation, particularly for large, complex projects with multiple investigators, poses numerous challenges. Program evaluators in these circumstances do not have the same degree of control as, say, experimental psychologists and must find ways to obtain data…

Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, faculty members and student affairs educators often believe that the answers they seek about assessment are secrets kept by an all-knowing, powerful person. If they can just find the Wizard of Assessment and be granted the secret assessment formula, all will be well. The student affairs educators at California…

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.…

There are pressures for researchers to demonstrate impact and relevance. This paper recounts the case of translating research into training on coaching for mass consumption in secondary schools in England as part of a Government strategy. The account describes how the materials were developed for the particular format and how they were fine tuned…

The growing interest in human resources development (HRD) is a response to the increasingly competitive business environment which, in turn, has been shaped by such forces as the emergence of global competition, the quickening pace of technological innovation and the reduction of federal regulations in some industries. This monograph seeks to…