In Canada, in-depth evaluations of federal programs are intended to occur every 5 years. As such, evaluation is a periodic retrospective (lag) indicator examining results achieved versus program objectives. In a Canadian context, stand-alone evaluations have proved challenging to implement, time consuming, and not well adapted to annual management…

Following a 2011 report by the National Research Council (NRC) on successful K-12 education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), Congress asked the National Science Foundation to identify methods for tracking progress toward the report's recommendations. In response, the NRC convened the Committee on an Evaluation Framework…

The Youth Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program (EFNEP) is one of the United States Department of Agriculture's hallmark nutrition education programs for limited-resource youth. The objective of this study was to gather opinions from experts in EFNEP and related content areas to identify costs, effects (impacts), and related instruments to…

Value-added methods refer to efforts to estimate the relative contributions of specific teachers, schools, or programs to student test performance. In recent years, these methods have attracted considerable attention because of their potential applicability for educational accountability, teacher pay-for-performance systems, school and teacher…

This paper highlights several current collaborative activities of the National Early Childhood Technical Assistance Center (NECTAC). There are many specific examples of TA (Technical Assistance) collaborations that take place on a regular basis; the seven examples presented here were selected to represent different types of collaboration. The…

The development of the horse and buggy was a necessary first step toward the development of the automobile; in fact, the first cars were built by putting engines on buggies. So it is with school accountability. The failure of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to measure school performance is well known among researchers and, to some degree, among…

The Oregon Statewide Report Card is an annual publication required by law (ORS 329.115), which reports on the state of public schools and their progress towards the goals of the Oregon Educational Act for the 21st Century. The purpose of the Oregon Report Card is to monitor trends among school districts and Oregon's progress toward achieving the…

Since the first child care Quality Rating System (QRS) was implemented in Oklahoma 11 years ago (in 1998), 16 additional statewide systems have been launched and numerous states are piloting or developing a QRS (Zaslow, Tout, & Martinez-Beck, forthcoming). As QRS stakeholders across the nation look ahead to the next decade, it is important to take…

The Measurement and Evaluation Center in Reading Education (MECRE), funded through the U.S. Office of Education, was designed to study evaluation procedures presently in use and to prepare materials to assist school officials in evaluating reading programs. Emphasis was to be on evaluating Title I and Title III projects, and it was hoped that…

Evaluability assessment is a descriptive and analytic process intended to produce a reasoned basis for proceeding with an evaluation of use to both management and policymakers. It was jointly developed by the members of the program evaluation group of the Urban Institute between 1968 and 1978. The approach begins by obtaining management's…

The Child and Family Service Reviews (CFSR) conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services are a critical step towards improving the nation's child welfare services. However, although the federal emphasis on outcomes has helped to accelerate state interest in performance measurement, both the federal effort to measure performance and…

This document includes the appendices to the report listed above (TM 000 107). Appendix A is a copy of the Belmont Agreement, and Appendix B a list of the twenty states in the Belmont Group. In Appendix C, a detailed summary of all the legislative titles covered by the Joint Comprehensive Evaluation System (JCES) is given. Appendix D includes a…

Comments from program directors, Indian contractors, and tribal leaders are considered in the report of the Bureau of Indian Affairs' (B.I.A.) Indian Action Team Program, implemented in 1972 to provide Indian people living on reservations with job training through Indian Technical Assistance Center contracts with tribal groups. Funding was $66.2…

This is one of three documents constituting the mandated Interim Report on the National Assessment of Title I. This Executive Summary describes the studies that comprise the National Assessment of Title I and provides executive summaries of the findings of Volumes I and II. Volume I, Implementation of Title I, focuses on implementation of key…

A new Joint Comprehensive Evaluation System for the assessment of 15 different federal programs has been developed by the U.S. Office of Education. In this system these diverse program services will be thought of as resources available to meet the needs of critical target groups. Using this approach, a set of nine crucial questions that need to be…