Witnesses offered testimony bearing on budget issues and the reauthorization of the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) Programs; the Special Supplemental Summer Food Program; the State Administrative Expense Program; the Commodity Distribution Program; and the Nutrition Education and Training Program. Testimony concerning permanently authorized…

In order to ascertain the effectiveness of programed instruction as compared to teacher instruction and to evaluate the quality of classroom research by teachers, the Canadian Teachers' Federation offered ten instruction programs on mathematics and chemistry to teachers throughout the country and asked them to evaluate the effectiveness of the…

There is general agreement that human services (i.e., services that depend on direct interpersonal contact between a deliverer and a client) are difficult to evaluate. The author points out some sources of this difficulty and proposes a strategy for the evaluation of human services delivery. (Author/GDC)

Examines how the autoregressive earnings model developed by Ashenfelter to evaluate job-training programs can produce badly biased estimates of the magnitude and temporal pattern of program effects. Finds that the decay in Ashenfelter's estimated training effect for men was produced by a time-varying bias in his model, and presents a new, more…

Reviews research concerning sustained silent reading and lists factors that are important in determining whether such a reading program is successful. (FL)

This document consists of the two 2002 issues of the newsletter of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Elementary and Early Childhood Education (ERIC/EECE). Each issue contains a feature article and one or more short articles on topics related to early childhood education, calls for papers, announcements about Internet resources, news items about and list…

Analyzes data from a juvenile diversion program which seem to indicate that as program services increased, the likelihood of participant recidivism increased. Maintains that the unexpected findings resulted from flaws in data recording within the program and suggests that program designs should incorporate evaluation strategies in order to ensure…

Recent research indicates that participating in service-learning programs appears to benefit youngsters, but there is scant evidence demonstrating the connection between service and particular educational objectives. Except for consistent evidence supporting a reflection component, researchers have failed to identify which program elements and…

Discusses the difficulties in conducting a case study on the attitudes and beliefs that individuals held about mainstreaming a boy with disabilities, including changes in terminology, methodological dilemmas, and discrepancies between the definitions that participants explicitly shared and observations of their interactions with the boy. (CR)

This essay on EC 606 264, which found that more intense early intervention programs for children with disabilities were not more effective, comments on the "political incorrectness" of the results, the possibility for misinterpretation of the results, and the need to reexamine beliefs about what contributes to effective intervention programs. (JDD)

This article discusses the use of propensity scoring in experimental program evaluations to estimate impacts for subgroups defined by program features and participants' program experiences. The authors discuss estimation issues and provide specification tests. They also discuss the use of an overlooked data collection design--obtaining predictions…

This article examines the effectiveness of incentives in improving survey response rates of school counselors and compares the findings with those of previously researched populations. A $1 cash incentive increased response rates for a one-wave mailing of a questionnaire, while a raffle opportunity did not. The number and length of optional…

This paper discussed Consortium for Longitudinal Studies findings which demonstrate that, contrary to first impressions from earlier evaluation studies, early intervention preschool programs do have generally positive long term effects. A public information campaign to communicate these findings through all media is advocated. Problems of…

Several years ago, California, along with other states, discovered that there was a layering effect of categorical programs, both state and federal. Most programs were aimed at unique populations--disadvantaged, bilingual, etc. This proliferation and the evaluation requirements inherent in each of the categorical efforts created problems of…

This is a response to the criticism of "Sesame Street" by Herbert A. Sprigle in the December, 1972, issue of "Childhood Education." It is maintained that Sprigle misconstrued and misrepresented the program's mandate and objectives and that the design and reporting of his study are so flawed that his conclusions are virtually…