"The First-Year Seminar: Designing, Implementing, and Assessing Courses to Support Student Learning and Success," a five-volume series, is designed to assist educators who are interested in launching a first-year seminar or revamping an existing program. Each volume examines a different aspect of first-year seminar design or…

The purpose of this paper was to describe the process of development of assessment instruments for the Comparing Options in Secondary Mathematics: Investigating Curriculum (COSMIC) project. The COSMIC project was a three-year longitudinal comparative study focusing on evaluating high school students' mathematics learning from two distinct…

Based on two manuals developed by Goodwill as part of their staff training series on program review, this program evaluation manual is designed to help facility administrators implement and improve their service delivery. The book contains an introduction and nine chapters. The introduction defines program evaluation, provides a rationale and uses…

The Vocational Competency Achievement Tracking System (VoCATS) in North Carolina is a competency-based instructional management system that allows the collection of data on student performance achievement before, during, and after instruction. A preliminary pilot study was conducted to evaluate the implementation of the VoCATS program with…

Analyses of questionnaire data from a program evaluation indicate that the two dichotomous items "Would you recommend this to a friend?" and "Would you choose to do this again?" are not as interchangeable as might be expected from the survey literature. As part of the evaluation of a university program, a survey of graduates…

The overall purpose of the national Head Start evaluation is to assess the impact, on the children and parents being served, of: (1) the educational services component of Head Start, and (2) a new demonstration program within Head Start, Basic Educational Skills. The evaluation deals with a total of 65 Head Start programs and their families. This…

This vocational program guide is intended to assist in the organization, operation, and evaluation of a program in data entry operations in school districts, area vocational centers, and community colleges. The following topics are covered: program content (job title and description and curriculum framework and student performance standards);…

Instructional and program relevance of measures of student performance and use of standardized achievement tests, as measures of the quality of a student's educational experiences, are discussed. This focus is consonant with current emphasis on linking testing and instruction and on systemic efforts at program and instructional improvement.…

A context in which existing items may provide a convenient source of questions for questionnaires was explored through a case study making use of existing comparison groups. Two programs at Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU), the Science and Engineering Research Semester (SERS) and the Laboratory Graduate Research Participation (Lab Grad)…

A practical application of generalizability theory, demonstrating how the variance components contribute to understanding and interpreting the data collected to evaluate a program, is described. The evaluation concerned 120 learning modules developed for the Dental Auxiliary Education Project. The goals of the project were to design, implement,…

A procedure was developed to combine subsets of curriculum-relevant items from a norm-referenced achievement test (NRT) with items comprising a locally-developed supplementary test in order to produce objective-referenced test (ORT) data for program evaluation. The study was designed to determine whether the ORTs were valid instruments for program…

Two aspects of criterion referenced testing are discussed: cutting scores and test length. Several practices in determining passing scores are enumerated: (1) setting passing scores so that a predetermined percent of students pass; (2) inspecting each test item to determine how important it is that it be answered correctly; (3) determining the…

The effectiveness of multiple matrix sampling was examined in a study of 495 students' attitudes toward a computer education program. A post hoc analysis of variance was used, with the class as the unit of analysis. The Computer Attitude Scale, a 30-item rating scale, was used to measure attitudes toward learning about and working with computers.…