This paper presents the author's comment on "Evaluation Field Building in South Asia: Reflections, Anecdotes, and Questions" by Katherine Hay. Hay raises a number of extremely relevant issues relating to evaluation field building in South Asia. In this paper, the author aims to underscore the importance of three priorities for initiating…

This paper contains results of an empirical study that tested the efficacy and acceptability of two templates designed to fully involve students in proper and fair peer-assessments of their group project work (GPW) by providing concrete evidence of independent progressive documentation of their peers' contributions to the work-process and…

Background: Those involved in school health education programs generally believe that health-education programs can play an important role in helping young people make positive health decisions. Thus, it is to document the effects of such programs through rigorous evaluations published in peer-reviewed journals. Methods: This paper helps the…

The papers in this dialogue help develop evaluation as a field (both in South Asia and other regions). What comes through in all of the papers is both humility of where evaluation is as a field and imagination and ambition of where evaluators could be in the near future. Reading the papers in this forum makes them enthusiastic about being…

Good evaluation requires that evaluation efforts themselves be evaluated. Many things can and often do go wrong in evaluation work. Accordingly, it is necessary to check evaluations for problems such as bias, technical error, administrative difficulties, and misuse. Such checks are needed both to improve ongoing evaluation activities and to assess…

Distance writing programs still struggle with assessment strategies that can evaluate student writing as well as their ability to communicate about that writing with peers at a distance. This article uses Kim, Smith and Maeng's 2008 distance education program assessment scheme to evaluate a single distance writing program at Old Dominion…

While participatory evaluation (PE) constitutes an important trend in the field of evaluation, its ontology has not been systematically analyzed. As a result, the concept of PE is ambiguous and inadequately theorized. Furthermore, no existing instrument accurately measures stakeholder participation. First, this article attempts to overcome these…

It is familiar in the world of systems building that funders start out saying they are not particularly interested in attribution, only to later begin using words like "prove" and "impact." Boards begin by asking for intelligent reflection from the 30,000-foot level and then suddenly want to know how many more children are ready for school.…

Are the five states that are participating in the Great Start project, in fact, off to a Great Start? The simple answer from a casual read of this excellent case study appears to be "yes." Any early learning initiative that begins with a scientific evaluation is off to a great start. Sadly, some public and private funders have begun early learning…

Current economic conditions and the increasing competition for government funding are leading to an increased focus on the impact of research. Measuring the impact of research is difficult because not all impacts are direct and some can be negative or result from the identification of problems that require a non-research response. The time between…

Evaluating higher education degree programs is an arduous task. This paper suggests innovative strategies for addressing four types of challenges that commonly occur during program evaluation: identifying theoretical models for evaluation, balancing potentially conflicting standards, accommodating faculty differences, and aligning courses.…

There is an increasing interest in the field of experiential education to move beyond simply documenting the value of experiential education programs and, instead, develop more evidence-based models for experiential education practice (cf., Gass, 2005; Henderson, 2004). Due in part to the diversity of experiential education programs, participants,…

A large body of literature documents the central importance of fidelity of program implementation in creating an internally valid research design and considering such fidelity in judgments of research quality. The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) provides web-based summary ratings of educational innovations and is the only rating group that is…

Ethical concerns are rising in the business world. With this in mind, training and performance improvement practitioners, especially during evaluation projects, should be aware of principles and codes of ethics, and their behaviors and decisions should reflect the standards recognized by members of the professional society. A study was conducted…

This study examines two community college instructional support programs to explore the effectiveness of an evaluation model--responsive evaluation theory--that may ease the tensions between a concern over programs' processes and reporting requirements for program outcomes. The study uses a comparative qualitative case study design and applies…