Practical and technical advice is provided for staff responsible for planning evaluations of Educational Consolidation and Improvement Act (ECIA) Chapter 1 migrant programs at the state level. The report is limited to evaluating achievement gains in basic skills; this is, however, acknowledged as only one facet of a comprehensive migrant program evaluation. Existing evaluation approaches found in annual migrant evaluation reports for the 1981-82 and 1982-83 schools years are discussesd. Guidelines for developing a state plan include building a program profile of instructional services offered to migrant students, setting priorities for evaluation, and selecting or developing evaluation strategies in relation to the priorities. The report outlines elements of a program profile and discusses four evaluation approaches--norm-referenced evaluation, pre-post-matched scores, post-test only, and state assessment programs. Purpose, design features, testing features, aggregation, strengths, limitations, conditions supporting use, and recent use are presented for each evaluation type and information is summarized in a table. An appendix provides instructions for using pretest scores to select Chapter 1 participants in a norm-referenced evaluation model. A sequence of eight steps for implementation is laid out in detail. (LFL)