In 1997, American Evaluation Association member George Grob, now retired from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and currently President of the Center for Public Program Evaluation, made a testimony on Medicare home health care fraud and abuse before the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging. The occasion was to announce the…

Planning, implementing, and assessing a service-learning project can be a complex task because service-learning projects often involve multiple constituencies and aim to meet both the needs of service providers and community partners. In this article, Stufflebeam's Context, Input, Process, and Product (CIPP) evaluation model is recommended as a…

The effective integration of current technologies in teaching and research is a high priority for today's universities. To support the technology skills of university faculty, staff, and students, the subject university's office for faculty training and support, provides free, 24/7 access to a collection of online technology tutorials leased from…

Assessment is both essential and a potentially powerful positive force. Music teachers need to provide assessment evidence to survive in today's data-driven school environment. However, the more important reasons they must assess are to improve their professional effectiveness as teachers, to improve student learning, and to help them advocate for…

Never before in the history of the teaching profession has there been such a need for comprehensive evaluation of all teacher preparation programs, most especially professional development schools (PDSs). This need is driven not only by the pressures of the age of accountability, but also by the need for the PDS movement to act ethically and…

The Go Wild with Fruits and Veggies! curriculum incorporates wild animal characters to motivate 3rd-5th grade children to increase fruit and vegetable intake and physical activity. Positive findings from a rural setting regarding a self-reported increase in intake of vegetables (n = 1,285) were verified by more intensive evaluation of vegetable…

Background: The philosophical underpinnings of evaluation guidelines set forth by a funding agency can sometimes seem inconsistent with that of the intervention. Purpose: Our purpose is to introduce questions pertaining to the contrast between the instructional program's underlying philosophical beliefs and assumptions and those underlying our…

In the context of intensifying accountability for academic work internationally, there are increasing pressures on individual supervisors, departments and universities to evaluate the quality of doctoral supervision. Existing evaluation tools are focused at departmental rather than individual level and are mostly quantitative. Evaluation for…

Good evaluation requires that evaluation efforts themselves be evaluated. Many things can and often do go wrong in evaluation work. Accordingly, it is necessary to check evaluations for problems such as bias, technical error, administrative difficulties, and misuse. Such checks are needed both to improve ongoing evaluation activities and to assess…

Environmental field days offer a distinct opportunity to connect students with science and the environment. The literature on field days, informed by research on field trips, provides a framework for best practices. If there are best practices, however, then presence or lack of the practice should have a discernible impact on the outcomes of the…

The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) is working to respond to increased interest in the use of growth models for school accountability. Growth models are based on tracking change in individual student achievement scores over multiple years. While growth models have been used for decades in academic research and program evaluation, a…

This article describes an evaluation that was judged to be unsuccessful from the point of view of key program stakeholders. This was due to the fact that the evaluation did not support program advocates who had much to gain from positive evaluation findings. We argue that, although the knowledge needs of stakeholders must be taken into account,…

Evaluation in environmental education is fairly nascent despite decades-long attention to its importance. In setting the context for future chapters appearing in this special issue of the "Journal of Evaluation and Program Planning," attention is devoted to the political circumstances associated with retrenchment in the public sector and increased…

As bibliometric indicators are objective, reliable, and cost-effective measures of peer-reviewed research outputs, they are expected to play an increasingly important role in research assessment/management. Recently, a bibliometric approach was developed and integrated within the evaluation framework of research funded by the National Cancer…

A simulation study was conducted in an attempt to examine how evaluators modify their evaluation design in response to differing stakeholder groups. In this study, evaluators were provided with a fictitious description of a school-based program. They were then asked to design an evaluation of the program. After the evaluation design decisions were…