The author of an indicator that tests evaluation system compliance with good governance principles addresses the UNDP's response to his article by offering an empirical test of the UNDP's commitment to reform. While the UNDP Evaluations Office claims to be working on reforms, the test exposes the unwillingness of the UNDP Evaluations Office to…

In this paper, the author considers certain aspects of the problem of obtaining unbiased information about the merits of a program or product, whether for purposes of decision making or for accountability. The evaluation of personnel, as well as the evaluation of proposals and evaluations, generally involves a different set of problems than those…

The educational technologies of the past quarter century--from teaching machines to minimal competency testing--all share the general purpose of helping educators make better, or more uniform, decisions. The currently favored technique for shaping local decisions is criterion-referenced testing. Some criterion-referenced testers first find out how…

Mandated teacher evaluations are of little use to educators for a variety of reasons, including lack of reliability and validity of evaluation instruments and methods, failure of evaluation systems to adhere to the Personnel Evaluation Standards (Joint Committee, 2008), and the inherent bias in using classroom observations as a method of…

Background: Return on investment (ROI) is one of the most popular evaluation metrics. ROI analysis (when applied correctly) is a powerful tool of evaluating existing information systems and making informed decisions on the acquisitions. However, practical use of the ROI is complicated by a number of uncertainties and controversies. The article…

This article presents an interview with Ralph Tyler. This interview will be of interest to those entering the field of education as well as for those who have made their home within the field for some time now. In the interview, Dr. Tyler discusses work in education and educational evaluation that spans over a half a century. He describes issues…

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…

The constraints of conducting evaluations in real-world settings often necessitate the implementation of less than ideal designs. Unfortunately, the standard method for estimating the precision of a result (i.e., confidence intervals [CI]) cannot be used for evaluative conclusions that are derived from multiple indicators, measures, and data…

The purpose of this article is to extend the discussion of issues currently being debated on the need for more rigorous program evaluation in educational and other sectors of research, to the field of international development evaluation, reviewing the different approaches which can be adopted to rigorous evaluation methodology and their…

While the current debate in the evaluation community has concentrated on examining and explicating implications of the choice of methods for evaluating federal programs, the authors of this paper address the challenges faced by the government in the selection of funding mechanisms for supporting program evaluation efforts. The choice of funding…