Impact evaluation and measurement are highly complex and can pose challenges for both social impact providers and funders. Measuring the impact of social interventions requires the continuous exploration and improvement of evaluation approaches and tools. This article explores the available evidence on meta-evaluation--the "evaluation of…

Over the last few decades, there has been an increase in the number of large federally funded transdisciplinary programs and initiatives. Scholars have identified a need to develop frameworks, methodologies, and tools to evaluate the effectiveness of these large collaborative initiatives, providing precise ways to understand and assess the…

Tiered evidence initiatives are an important federal strategy to incentivize and accelerate the use of rigorous evidence in planning, implementing, and assessing social service investments. The Social Innovation Fund (SIF), a program of the Corporation for National and Community Service, adopted a public-private partnership approach to tiered…

Evaluating teachers' professional development initiatives (PDI) is one of the main challenges for the teacher professionalisation field. Although different studies have focused on the effectiveness of PDI, the obtained effects and evaluative methods have been found to be widely divergent. By means of a narrative review, this study provides an…

Program evaluation often suffers due to time constraints, imperfect instruments, incomplete data, and the need to report standardized metrics. This article about the evaluation process for the Wi$eUp financial education program showcases the difficulties inherent in evaluation and suggests best practices for assessing program effectiveness. We…

The paper examines the benefits claimed for action learning at individual, organisational and inter-organisational levels. It goes on to identify both generic difficulties in evaluating development programmes and action learning specifically. The distinction between formative and summative evaluation is considered and a summative evaluation…

Background: Recent reviews suggest that many plausible programs are found to have at best small impacts not commensurate with their cost, and often have no detectable positive impacts at all. Even programs with initial rigorous impact evaluation (RIE) that show them to be effective often fail a second test with an expanded population or at…

The Safe Schools/Healthy Students (SS/HS) national evaluation seeks to assess both the implementation process and the results of the SS/HS initiative, exploring factors that have contributed to or detracted from grantee success. Each site is required to forge partnerships with representatives from education, mental health, juvenile justice, and…

The need for higher enrollment, along with a greater focus on educational access and making college more accessible has created an urgent need for community colleges and universities to develop retention and persistence strategies for students who are not prepared academically and may lack the resources to be successful in college (Bailey &…

Why do we continue to see evidence that nonprofit staff feel like outcome measurement is missing important aspects of their work? Based on an analysis of over 1,000 pages of material in 10 outcome measurement guides and a focused literature review of frontline work in three types of nonprofit organizations, this article shows that existing outcome…

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…

This report, based on a survey of a nationally representative sample of school districts in Common Core-adopting states, examines school districts' efforts to implement the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The report addresses district leaders' views on the rigor of the CCSS and their impact on learning and instruction, progress on and…

The study describes an evaluation of a 48-week physical activity and nutritional education programme for overweight/obese school-age children using quantitative and qualitative methods. The majority of participants were obese or severely obese when enrolled, and while some improvements in body mass index, self-esteem and engagement in a range of…

In response to rising rates of firearms violence that peaked in the mid-1990s, a wide range of policy interventions have been developed in an attempt to reduce violent crimes committed with firearms. Although some of these approaches appear to be effective at reducing gun violence, methodological variations make comparing effects across program…

Notwithstanding significant efforts by international aid agencies, aid ineffectiveness became apparent in 1990s as the impact of continued development intervention did not endure the expected outcomes. Conventional monitoring and evaluation by those agencies is critiqued for focusing on measuring project outcomes and giving little attention to…