Grantees on national projects are often required by their funders to take part in evaluation activities. While the requirement can encourage compliance, grantees can feel overburdened and disempowered with their evaluation experience. Evaluators in a national cross-site evaluation utilized multiple strategies for obtaining buy-in of participating…

In this article, I outline three structured protocols that professional development school steering committees and other collaborative groups could use to support an intentional reflective process aimed at growth and improvement. Using these protocols provides all participants with a voice in identifying current strengths and areas for growth,…

Assessing the effectiveness of educational technology professional development (ETPD) must go beyond obtaining feedback from participants about their level of satisfaction with a workshop presenter. Effective and meaningful assessment of ETPD requires that we design inservice learning activities that can be measured using methods that are…

In 2005, state fish and wildlife agency wanted to examine how one of its conservation education programs was providing science-based understanding and outdoor experiences by evaluating students' knowledge, skills, attitudes and intended behavioral outcomes related to fish, fishing and aquatic habitats in Montana. A key factor in this study was the…

Increasingly, staff members in community and public health programs and projects are required to undertake evaluation activities. There is, however, limited capacity for, and understanding of, evaluation within this workforce. Building the capability of individual workers and thereby contributing to the overall capacity among the community and…

The E-Learning Maturity Model (eMM) is a quality improvement framework designed to help institutional leaders assess their institution's e-learning maturity. This paper reviews the eMM, drawing on examples of assessments conducted in New Zealand, Australia, the UK and the USA to show how it helps institutional leaders assess and compare their…

The Auburn University Educational Leadership Team and its K-12 practitioner and community partners collaboratively developed a comprehensive, on-going evaluation plan to assess a newly implemented field-based graduate program. The purpose of the present manuscript was to describe the evaluation guidelines and plans. The leadership team and…

Competence-based education is becoming increasingly popular. Competencies are used more and more as the starting point for designing curricula and instructional methods, especially in vocational education and training, to realize authentic and self-steering study programmes. Despite its popularity in both research and educational settings, there…

This research study investigated the assessment practices of five different undergraduate business programs. It examines the learning outcomes required for the business programs and their linkages with general education outcomes. Specific assessment methods, the results from assessments, and how business program faculty use assessment findings to…

We join the authors in this special issue in their call to embrace a culture of evaluation. Obstacles to change are formidable. Educators debate their purpose--provide knowledge or achieve environmental goals--and we have limited evidence of the effectiveness of environmental programs and policies. Change requires collaboration across…

In October 2010, WestEd's Strategic Literacy Initiative (SLI) won an i3 "Validation" grant to scale up and validate the Reading Apprenticeship (RA) model in three core secondary content area classes: U.S. history, biology, and English language arts. SLI's proposal stated two goals. Goal 1: To transform academic literacy teaching and…

"The Measures of Success" (MoS) project set out to develop, implement, and present the results of an evaluation model that could assess longer-term outcomes of workplace education programs for increasing literacy and Essential Skills. The model was tested at 18 work sites in Manitoba and Nova Scotia and included training programs that…

In the domain of school-based tobacco control, there is a large gap between the research being performed and the type of research needed to inform school-based prevention activities. The tobacco module of the school health action planning and evaluation system is a data collection and feedback system designed to support school-based tobacco…

How do evaluation practitioners make choices when they evaluate a program? What function do evaluation theories play in practice? In this article, I report on an exploratory study that examined evaluation practices in France. The research began with observations of practitioners' activities, with a particular focus on the phases of evaluation…

Measurement in early childhood is an increasingly large-scale endeavor addressing purposes of accountability, program improvement, child outcomes, and intervention decision making for individual children. The Early Communication Indicator (ECI) is a measure relevant to intervention decision making for infants and toddlers, including response to…