Evaluation of community-campus partnerships is a contested topic and, in many ways, is still at an early stage of development. With growing momentum behind community-university collaboration and increased pressure to document the positive impact of universities, there is a pressing need for research and innovation in this area. Many community…

To produce actionable and accessible assessment findings that drive innovation and improvement, strategies should be implemented at the national and local level throughout each stage of the assessment process. Fostering these findings is the need to authentically engage stakeholders throughout the assessment process. Done well, the engagement of…

This article asks three questions: (1) Why do the National School Library Standards for Learners, School Librarians, and School Libraries matter to school administrators; (2) How is an administrator's knowledge of the role of the school librarian as articulated in these standards; and (3) Is it known what matters to school administrators and how…

To address increasing accountability demands, instructional leaders must find ways to expand the current reality of faculty development to create a culture where continuous growth and learning are the standard for professional behavior. Growth Infusion is a framework for creating such a culture. The framework is a result of an extensive search for…

The interest and effort in evaluation capacity building (ECB) continues to grow enormously among organizations, funders, and evaluators. Yet a research synthesis of the ECB literature (Labin, Duffy, Meyers, Wandersman, & Lesesne, 2012) revealed major limitations in the science and practice of ECB. This forum on ECB, which includes two past…

In its first Career and Technical Education (CTE) playbook, "Putting Career and Technical Education to Work for Students" (see ED609912), ExcelinEd examined the need and rationale for strengthening statewide CTE programs and provided a process that state policymakers can undertake to do just that. Serious efforts to develop and…

In the broad field of evaluation, the importance of stakeholders is often acknowledged and different categories of stakeholders are identified. Far less frequent is careful attention to analysis of stakeholders' interests, needs, concerns, power, priorities, and perspectives and subsequent application of that knowledge to the design of…

The importance of evaluation use has led to a large amount of theoretical and empirical study. Evaluation use, however, is still not well understood. There is a need to capture the complexity of this phenomenon across a diverse range of contexts. In response to such complexities, the notion of "evaluation influence" emerged. This article presents…

As readers of "Assessment Update" know, the call for assessment is sweeping over the globe, so much so that faculty and administrators are finding it difficult to ignore it--though many may wish they could. Unfortunately, awareness does not lead to an increase in assessment implementation because fear of assessment is still widespread. The push…

A policy forum held May 11-13, 2011 to provide input from stakeholders to the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) focused on the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) accountability reporting system known as the State Performance Plan/Annual Performance Report (SPP/APR) process. Participants discussed their assessment of the…

The authors' experiences with improvement efforts, particularly those which failed to be fully implemented, cause them to wonder if other approaches to improvement will increase their potential for success. They conclude that principles--powerful beliefs that underlie actions--are essential to sustained system and school improvement. Over the…

Within the current accountability context of education in the United States and Canada, there is a clear need to educate teachers on effectively using assessments to support, measure, and communicate student learning. Despite this need, assessment has historically been a neglected area in teacher education programs with comparatively little…

For the internal evaluator, the issue of trust can be one of the more difficult ethical matters to manage. An organization might choose to conduct an internal program evaluation for a variety of reasons, including capitalizing on the abilities of invested stakeholders to assess aspects of a program, building an institutional culture oriented…

Internationally, demands for greater certainty over the quality of higher education are multiplying. This article argues that convention theory offers insights for considering quality in higher education in an increasingly market-based system. Examples from the Australian higher education system are used to show how quality conventions can be…

This paper first presents an overview of the concepts of assessment and evaluation in Open and Distance Learning (ODL) environment. The large numbers of students and numerous courses make assessment and evaluation very difficult and administrative nightmare at Distance Learning (DL) institutions. These challenges informed exploring issues relating…