Objective: This article describes the evaluation of permanency roundtables, an intervention to help youth in foster care achieve legal permanency and the challenges evaluators faced in finding and using appropriate comparison data. Method: In 2009, permanency roundtables were conducted for 496 children in Georgia, most of whom had spent extended…

How does one grade an electronic portfolio? This question is one I have thought about, have enacted, and have written about, primarily in reference to ePortfolios used in writing classrooms (Yancey, McElroy, & Powers, 2013). But what happens when the content and developmental levels are changed, in this case from an undergraduate first-year…

Educational agencies are going through a difficult transition, with important consequences in terms of de-legitimacy of the social mandate historically assigned to the school. The reason for this widespread unease can be traced to the fact that today we live in a complex system. This paper arises within this problematic framework with the intent…

In the present offering we challenge the presumption that the educational testing of students provides objective information about such students. This presumption largely rests on an empiricist account of science. In light of mounting criticism, however, empiricist foundationalism has given way to a social epistemology. From this standpoint,…

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) was designed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to evaluate the quality, equity, and efficiency of school systems around the world. Specifically, the PISA has assessed 15-year-old students' reading, mathematics, and science literacy on a 3-year cycle, since…

Virtual charter schools have emerged over the last decade as an increasingly popular alternative to traditional public schooling. Unlike their face-to-face counterparts, virtual charter schools educate students through blended or entirely online curricula. They present a host of new policy issues that should be scrutinized in order to ensure that…

Systematic review methodology can be distinguished from narrative reviews of the literature through its emphasis on transparent, structured and comprehensive approaches to searching the literature and its requirement for formal synthesis of research findings. There appears to be relatively little use of the systematic review methodology within the…

Attention to evaluation quality is commonplace, even if sometimes implicit. Drawing on her 2010 Presidential Address to the American Evaluation Association, Leslie Cooksy suggests that evaluation quality depends, at least in part, on the intersection of three factors: (a) evaluator competency, (b) aspects of the evaluation environment or context,…

Student evaluation of teaching is commonplace in many universities and may be the predominant input into the performance evaluation of staff and organisational units. This article used publicly available student evaluation of teaching data to present examples of where institutional responses to evaluation processes appeared to be educationally…

Preschool education is increasingly being recognized as an integral part of efforts to ensure that all children enter school ready to learn and as a way to help close the achievement gaps that exist at the time children enter kindergarten. Such efforts are growing across the country. According to the most recent data, 54 different preschool…

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…

After months of waiting, the grant reviews came back: "excellent," "excellent," and "fair." What?! How can this be? Why is the third review so out of line with the first two? On more than one occasion a principal investigator (PI) has been frustrated not only by a negative funding decision but more so by the accompanying reviewer evaluation forms…

Standardizing aspects of assessments has long been recognized as a tactic to help make evaluations of examinees fair. It reduces variation in irrelevant aspects of testing procedures that could advantage some examinees and disadvantage others. However, recent attention to making assessment accessible to a more diverse population of students…

Using computers to evaluate teachers based on student test scores is more difficult than it seems. Value-added modeling is a genuinely serious attempt to grapple with the difficulties. Value-added modeling carries the promise of measuring teacher quality automatically and objectively, and improving school systems at minimal cost. The essence of…

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…