The story of the national evaluation of the Follow Through program mirrors the difficulties in trying to evaluate a complex social program that changed its community service orientation to a strategy of planned variation of early childhood programs. (Author/MLF)

Abt Associates, the firm responsible for the primary analysis of the Follow Through experiment, summarize the findings. Their clearest finding indicates that local circumstances, attitudes, and activities unmeasured by evaluation have much more to do with the effectiveness of Follow Through models, without exception, than do their theoretical…

Documenting treatment integrity is an important issue in research and practice in any discipline concerned with prevention and intervention. However, consensus concerning the dimensions of treatment integrity and how they should be measured has yet to emerge. Advances from three areas in which significant treatment integrity work has taken…

The technique originating from the study of ecological systems for the examination of dynamic educational systems over time is utilized. The technique is based on the theory of energy exchanges in interactions between variables. Using this technique, interactions among variables can be specified and simulated over time using an analog computer.…

Three models of educational evaluation are discussed: the intuitive decisions model, the experimental model, and the feedback model. The feedback model is most useful because it will provide baseline information about current accomplishments of the school systems. Once the feedback process is well underway, it is then profitable to discuss goals.…