Over the last 50 years the process of producing transcripts of all kinds of interactions has become an important practice for researchers in a wide range of disciplines. Only rarely, however, has transcription been analyzed as a cultural practice. It is here argued that it is precisely the lack of understanding of what is involved in transcribing…

Drawn by a vision of solving performance problems in a systematic, systemic and results-based approach, training professionals are turning to human performance technology (HPT). However, many who try to implement HPT find themselves struggling to measure the improvements their interventions are designed to achieve. Ford notes that these…

District and school administrators are challenged to provide learning environments that help students attain and surpass set levels of academic and social learning. In times of economic strife, discussions often turn to the efficient use of financial and human resources to maximize school districts' capacity to fulfill those objectives. Most…

Despite the best of intentions, qualitative researchers can be faced, in some circumstances, with having to make meaning from thin, or less than optimal, data. Using a real study as context, the authors describe the ways that they made sense of their thin data on teachers' perceptions of a large-scale evaluation instrument. They propose a…

The Comparing Options in Secondary Mathematics: Investigating Curriculum (COSMIC) project is a longitudinal study of student learning from two types of mathematics curricula: integrated and subject-specific. Previous large-scale research studies such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) indicate that numerous variables are…

How can indigenous evaluators implement culturally competent models in First Nations communities while ensuring that government grant evaluation requirements are met? Through describing the challenges in one tribal community in the United States, this article will discuss how American Indian/Alaska Native substance abuse prevention programs are…

This article explores the experiences of adult learners and tutors on a particular externally assessed distance-learning degree programme. On this programme, assignments are set, reviewed and graded independently of the on-site tutor by the external awarding body. An analysis of eight interviews with four tutors and four graduates from one such…

Assessment reform has been on the educational agenda of many countries for at least two decades. In this article - which begins by charting what lies behind the calls for a paradigm shift in assessment and what is being proposed instead - classroom assessment is explored in detail in relation to its links with teacher and student assessment, as…

Instructional conceptions are students' ideas about relationships between instructional features of a learning environment or specific instructional interventions on the one hand, and learning on the other (Lowyck, Elen, & Clarebout, 2004). A variety of methods have been used to assess such conceptions. None of these instruments are satisfactory.…

This final report describes a pilot program for the simultaneous appraisal and description of concurrent television newsfilm from the holdings (dating from 1955 to 1972) of three Madison, Wisconsin television stations. The sections of the report are: (1) Project Background and History; (2) Problems of Estimating; (3) Evaluation of the Physical…

The issue of evaluation in adult literacy is addressed in this paper. It is assumed that evaluation is a necessary and vital function in an adult literacy program because it helps administrators understand their efforts, increases information available about a program's functioning, builds an image, and facilitates the discovery of information on…

Artificial criteria included in speech evaluation forms in the basic communication classroom to assess students' communication competencies fail to reflect what is known about communication as a transaction and about communication competence. Communication competence is most commonly defined from the action perspective which focuses on the…

This paper examines problems associated with psychiatric diagnoses. In the early 1960s, Karl Menninger and others prepared a treatise on the problems with psychiatric diagnosis, both from the standpoint of inherent weaknesses in the system and from an awareness of professional abuse of the system. The paper concentrates on three aspects of…

This paper explores the impact of the Texas Teacher Appraisal System (TTAS) through an analysis of interviews with 24 high school English teachers. The first part of the paper discusses the development of the TTAS and the second section describes the study. The teachers were asked if and how the TTAS had affected their teaching performance, what…

The development of readability formulas for the evaluation of foreign language texts began with research in the United States on reading materials used in second language learning and has extended to many other countries first by adaptation of formulas intended for English language texts and then by original investigation. There exist now many…