This review is embedded in a plea. It is a plea to treat educational objectives as data. Fallible data. The review itself surveys methods for those particular data that reflect judgment of what education should accomplish. Evaluation requires judgment. Decision-making requires judgment. Both are judgmental in themselves but also depend on judgments previously made. A school and a curriculum are where they are because of judgments from within and from without. Judgments are made early, and late, and in between times. To understand what a school is doing requires an understanding of what a school is expected to do. In education, as elsewhere, judgments will continue to rest on incomplete knowledge, imprecise measurements, and inadequate experience. No error-free system is possible, but improvements are within easy reach. The evaluator may lessen the arbitrariness of judging and decision-making by introducing data-gathering methods already developed by other social scientists. Social psychologists, behavioral scientists, economists, political scientists, and historians routinely study opinions, preferences, and values. Many of their methods can be used to measure the judgments that shape an educational program.

Evaluation activities of curriculum projects : a starting point

1: Objectives, Priorities, and Other Judgment Data

In this paper we have tried to describe the research pertinent to the activity of formative evaluation. While the number of good examples of formative evaluation is expanding, the level of research into the process is relatively limited. Perhaps a compromise to the difficult task of accumulating research data on formative evaluation might be suggested. When formative evaluation activities have been successful in terms of program effects and staff satisfaction, then detailed technical reports might be made available to the evaluation public. Formative evaluation might improve as a consequence of the technology developed in the course of finding solutions to development data problems. Both the increase in technology as a result of dissemination of successful procedures and the pursuit of experimental research on the process of evaluation might ultimately remove formative evaluation recommendations from the realm of seers and clairvoyants and thrust it closer to, if not into, the domain of scientific application.

Formative evaluation of instructional development

Efforts in the past decade to reduce the incidence of major social problems have stimulated a new interest in program evaluation. Numerous writings have appeared on the use of the concepts and methods of behavioral research in evaluating these interventions. This paper is a review of that literature. It surveys evaluation programs designed to produce some identifiable change in individual or social groups. The first part of the paper is concerned with basic issues which include definitions, approaches to evaluation methodology, roles of evaluation in program development, and distinctions among various forms of research. The second section deals with organizational matters such as the establishment of the evaluative research role, administration of evaluative research, utilization of the results of evaluation, and implications of client activism for evaluation. The third portion reviews methodological issues in measurement and design of evaluation studies.

methods

/pdf/issues-in-the-evaluation-of-social-programs-3b9g2wiyco.pdf

Issues in the Evaluation of Social Programs

The past few decades have witnessed a marked increase in deliberate attempts to deal with social problems through rationally planned intervention programs. This approach, which was initially focused on the areas of juvenile delinquency and the recidivism of adult offenders, can now be found applied to the full gamut of social problems. In each specific area, be it crime, sexual deviance, or the "improper" utilization of health or educational services, a myriad of social programs have been proposed and carried out by both government and private organizations. Along with this proliferation of social programs has come an increased concern for assessing their effectiveness and efficiency. One important response to this concern has been the use of applied social science research to collect data about programs for the purpose of assessing their impact. Thus, the past decade has seen an explosion of interest in so-called "evaluation research" on the part of foundations, universities, professional associations, consumer groups, and others, as well as by all levels of government. Prior to 1964, for example, only a few hundred thousand dollars was spent annually on evaluation of educational programs. But by 1970, the federal government alone was spending over five million dollars per year evaluating such programs (Cohen and Garet, 1975). Similar figures could be cited for other areas such as health, mental health, crime prevention, and vocational rehabilitation.

background

The Nonutilization of Evaluation Research

............................................................................................................. 3 Acknowledgement .............................................................................................. 4 1 Chapter One: Introduction to the Study ..................................................... 12 1.

Evaluation activities of curriculum projects : a starting point

Citations

1: Objectives, Priorities, and Other Judgment Data

Formative evaluation of instructional development

Issues in the Evaluation of Social Programs

The Nonutilization of Evaluation Research

EFL Teachers’ Views about their Roles in the Curriculum of the EFL Foundation Year Programme in Saudi Arabia

Related Papers (5)

The methodology of evaluation

The Countenance of Educational Evaluation

Implementing Sustainability in the Curriculum of Universities

Curriculum analysis process: Analysing fourteen industrial engineering programs

The Project Method in Action.