Addresses program evaluation of the personnel preparation in early-intervention programs. Describes an interdisciplinary preservice program, discusses the program's evaluation areas, reviews the specific evaluation tools, and presents evaluation results over a four-year period. Critical program components are highlighted. (Author/DB)

Describes the positive mental, physical, and social growth impacts that the camping experience had on the author, and urges camp program evaluation to plan and implement such changes. Sidebar lists steps of effective evaluation: program goals and objectives, goals of evaluation, implementation of evaluation, data analysis, and findings and…

First Step to Success is a collaborative home and school early intervention program designed to address secondary prevention goals and outcomes for behaviorally at-risk children in the K-2 age-grade range (see Walker, Kavanagh, Stiller, Golly, Severson, & Feil, 1998; Walker, Stiller, Golly, Kavanagh, Severson, & Feil, 1997). In 1999 the…

To evaluate the effects of an intensive tertiary reading intervention, 27 students with severe reading difficulties and disabilities, 14 of whom had demonstrated an inadequate response to 1-2 tiers of prior reading instruction, received a 16-week intervention package involving decoding and fluency skills. The decoding intervention was provided for…

Corrective Thinking Training, a cognitive-behavioral intervention, is often used to address delinquency. It is intended to help individuals develop more responsible thinking. An experimental study was conducted to evaluate the impact of Corrective Thinking Training on the self-reported level of responsible thinking of at--risk youth. The "How I…

At the No Treatment Day School, less than 15% of students used the dormitory during the school week. Located in the heart of a reservation and serving local students, the K-12 school enrolled over 1,000 students. The site received Therapeutic Residential Model funding for the 2001-2002 school year. Initial evaluation of this site found an array of…

A traditional way of assessing program effectiveness of academic programs has been by determining the percentage of students who complete programs and receive degrees or some other acknowledgment of completion. This method of assessment is particularly problematic for community colleges because only 4% of students who enroll in…

The medical director of a child guidance center is starting a new treatment program. The director has paid for three social work therapists to attend a cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) workshop to the population of poor, Spanish-speaking teens. However, the medical director struggles with how to bring the principles of evidence-based practice…

Although there has been a rapid increase in funding and attention to after-school programs, there is little understanding of how after-school programs impact children's developmental trajectories. The heterogeneity of American children makes it very unlikely that all children need after-school programming or that there is but one brand of…

Increasing availability of funds for development, design, and evaluation of alternative learning environments has challenged educational researchers to develop and validate innovative and effective interventions. The focus on accountability has resulted in an accelerated effort to record events, activities, and participation in substantive ways…

The Internet and World Wide Web are increasingly used to accelerate progress in a variety of fields. These applications go beyond the traditional technology- or computer-related fields and have expanded to nontechnical fields, which have benefited greatly from the use of the Web as a data-gathering and management support tool. The purpose of this…

Educators have long sought to define quality in education. With the proliferation of distance education and online learning powered by the Internet, the tasks required to assess the quality of online programs become even more challenging. To assist educators and institutions in search of quality assurance methods to continuously improve their…

"Common sense" is often used as a powerful rationale for implementing correctional programs that have no basis in criminology and virtually no hope of reducing recidivism. Within this context, we undertake a case study in "common-sense' corrections by showing how the rise of boot camps, although having multiple causes, was ultimately legitimized…

This article uses a program-level evaluation to assess the characteristics of smaller-scale project evaluations and their use for project improvement and accountability purposes. The authors used available information from the annual Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program evaluation surveys to describe the characteristics of evaluation…

The Youth Handgun Violence Prevention Project (YHVPP) was conducted in the Denver Metropolitan Area from July 1999 to June 2002. Several factors associated with youth attitudes and behaviors regarding handguns were identified and verified empirically. Interventions were designed to modify these factors and to evaluate their effectiveness in…