Three citizen advisory boards, designed to advise elected officials on how federal money should be spent locally, were examined. The Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) Planning Council, the Citizen's Task Force on Community Development Block Grants (two groups mandated by federal legislation), and the Human Services Commission (a…

The Task Force on Resource Allocation for Program Evaluation was established by Division H of the American Educational Research Association at the 1978 Annual Meeting in Toronto. This paper presents the recommendations of the Task Force concerning the allocation of resources for program evaluation. Program evaluation is needed to provide…

Developing a clear idea of needs and objectives for any particular school system is the first step in planning for educational processes. (MB)

Argues that most of the underlying assumptions of presently recommended solutions to the problem of heroin addiction are unreasonable, unwarranted, or at least open to more than one interpretation. (DM)

Program review is seen as a increasingly used tool by colleges and universities and system and state level boards to assess the quality of existing academic programs. The role of trustees in program review is that of setting broad policy goals. (MLW)

Program evaluation as a methodology is discussed, and its application to government export promotion programs is examined. Because the variety of approaches to export program evaluation, resulting data are often of limited usefulness. A programmatic approach to program evaluation is proposed. (TJH)

Describes the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and reviews and assesses research on its impact. Recommends policy reforms and randomized experiments to evaluate the program and any changes made to it. Weaknesses in research to date make the real impacts of WIC unclear. (Contains 79 references.) (SLD)

In April 2008, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) contracted with the Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) to facilitate a series of regional workshops and provide technical assistance to strengthen efforts to improve college readiness for all students. This final report summarizes these activities…

The issue of the perceived success of human services program evaluations is the specific focus of this paper. Five areas that affect the potential for producing effective program evaluation form a framework for discussing factors related to perceived success. The areas include inappropriate conceptualization of what an evaluation can accomplish,…

Policy Implications Analysis (PIA) is a tool designed to maximize the likelihood that an evaluation report will have an impact on decision-making. PIA was designed to help people planning and conducting evaluations tailor their information so that it has optimal potential for being used and acted upon. This paper describes the development and…

The article describes a survey of 36 dental education programs to identify educators' reactive policies and procedures in their patient treatment centers to minimize dental contamination and cross-contamination. (Author/CT)

Research evaluations should be directed at affecting the implementation of policies resulting from research, not at monitoring the outcomes of research, particularly in strategic research relating to government and industry. (MSE)

Introspective interviewing can often determine the magnitude of relations more meaningfully than statistical analysis. Deduction from empirically validated premises avoids many research design problems. Guesswork can be combined with sensitivity analysis to determine the effects of guesses and missing information on conclusions. (Author/DWH)

This article provides an analytical framework that not only explains the contradictions in the relationship between decentralization and development, but also facilitates constructive debate about decentralization's role in development. It also reviews the extent, form, and impact of recent decentralization policies and programs in less developed…