Practices in needs assessment are reviewed since 1981, the year the federal government changed the role it plays in promoting needs assessment in the public sector. The review is based on reports published to 1993 and indicates that needs assessment is flourishing in a variety of settings. (SLD)

Discussion of the reorganization of the national higher education system by the Australian government focuses on a questionnaire distributed to university librarians that examined quality assurance processes and management. Topics include quality indicators and libraries; methodologies, including Total Quality Management; allocation of quality…

Considers the competing demands placed on evaluators in relation to the service (characteristics of the intervention), the sample (people participating), and methodology or research design. Explores compromises that may be required between scientific ideals and real-world limitations, and assesses implications for obtaining meaningful results in…

American philanthropy, by local and national foundations, corporations, and wealthy individuals, has played many important roles in K-12 education: creating new schools, underwriting research, funding scholarships, testing hypotheses, generating new curricula, invoking ideals, setting agendas, bolstering training, and building a case for policy…

This study examined the magnitude of differences in standard scores, convergent validity, and concurrent validity when an individual's performance was gauged using the revised and the normative update (Woodcock, 1998) editions of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test in which the actual test items remained identical but norms have been updated. From…

A number of small countries face similar problems while organising external assessment of higher education institutions: how to select proper experts, how to prepare them and maintain? How to avoid bias or interest conflict between experts who evaluate the institution and the institution being evaluated? How to reduce the financial costs of…

A systematic review was conducted to examine the barriers to, and facilitators of, physical activity among young people (11-16 years). The review focused on the wider determinants of health, examining community- and society-level interventions. Four trials and 16 studies of young people's views were included. Evidence for the effectiveness of the…

This handbook is designed to help educators understand program evaluation processes so that they will be able to carry out evaluation tasks and talk knowledgeably to evaluators about what they want to find out from a program evaluation. The book reviews the purposes and uses of evaluation to help the reader identify the scope and direction of the…

Quality has become a priority issue for all concerned with early childhood care and education services. Starting from the premise that quality is a relative and dynamic concept based on values and beliefs, this collection advocates that the process of establishing definitions of quality should involve a range of stakeholder groups. The chapters…

The extent to which staff appraisal has been implemented at Britain's public sector further education (FE) institutions and the characteristics, benefits, and disadvantages of existing appraisal systems were examined in a survey of 233 FE institutions (36% of all institutions in the public FE sector). Of the FE institutions surveyed, 76% had one…

For the past 20 years, the University of Hawaii Community Colleges have had a formal process for the review of educational programs, requiring that each program undergo a systematic review at least once every 5 years. The result tended to be a lengthy document that chronicled the history of the previous 5 years and was far more descriptive than…

The use of restrictive factor analysis (RFA) is illustrated with data from the field of educational research. An attitude scale measuring the degree to which students feel they are accepted by their classmates is constructed in accordance with the Theory of Violators. The main idea of the Theory of Violators is that most problems associated with…

This review of literature and research concerns innovative programs and services for students in the transition between elementary and secondary schools. Chapter 1 identifies the areas of focus, methodology, context, guiding assumptions, and report structure. Chapter 2 looks at the characteristics and needs of early adolescence and discusses the…

Evaluators usually assume that the data they receive are valid, or at least, that the data reflect that which is being evaluated. In a recent evaluation in a large southern school district, evaluators compared their raw interview notes with interview notes edited by the teachers interviewed or project staff. The program evaluated was Project SEED,…

This study was conducted to examine individual differences with respect to values underlying the assessment of teaching competence in order to enhance the effectiveness and fairness of assessment. Nine classroom teachers who were preparing to be mentors of beginning teachers and five teacher educators indicated the relative importance (expressed…