As pressure builds to assess students, teachers, and schools, educational practitioners and policy makers are increasingly looking toward student perception surveys as a promising means to collect high-quality, useful data. For instance, the widely cited Measures of Effective Teaching study lists student perception surveys as one of the three key…

The REL Mid-Atlantic Webinar discussed the elements in a positive school climate and shared different methods for assessing school data, including the Comprehensive School Climate Inventory. The Q&A presented in this document address the questions participants had for Dr. Cohen following the webinar. The webinar recording and PowerPoint…

In this commentary, we examine Braverman's insights into the trade-offs between feasibility and rigor in evaluation measures and reject his assessment of the trade-off as a zero-sum game. We, argue that feasibility and policy salience are, like reliability and validity, intrinsic to the definition of a good measure. To reduce the tension between…

The commentaries on my article contain a number of points with which I disagree but also several with which I agree. For example, I continue to believe that the existence of many cases in which between-person variability does not increase with age indicates that greater variance with increased age is not inevitable among healthy individuals up to…

Compares qualitative and quantitative data, identifies common qualitative methods, describes a step-by-step process for gathering and analyzing qualitative data, and discusses two applications of the process to Extension. (Author)

The current literature is replete with instances of imprecise and conflicting usage of "qualitative" and "quantitative" evaluation. This paper presents a framework for making distinctions among several related concepts to eliminate this potential source of confusion. In the process, the terms "qualitative" and…

Discusses the need to reconceptualize early childhood education assessment in terms of the sociocultural theories that inform teaching and learning. Examines sociocultural approaches to assessment, considering assessment tools and the type of data they would gather. (JPB)

The first half of this paper concentrates on the need for the institution of evaluation methods which stress the systematic use of both quantitative techniques and qualitative, direct observation methods. In this way, a more comprehensive picture of the events under consideration may be presented, and changes in student learning and behavior may…

Describes the evaluation of a new model for software evaluation that emphasizes the collection of student performance data to determine the extent to which students learn the knowledge a software package intends to teach. Discussion covers the results of two studies, evaluation criteria and methods, evaluator subjectivity in decision making,…

In education research, a polar distinction is frequently made to describe and produce different kinds of research: "quantitative" versus "qualitative." In this article, the authors argue against that polarization and the associated polarization of the "subjective" and the "objective," and they question the attribution of generalizability to only…

Age is often ranked as a significant variable in research studies concerned with the measurement of intellectual and linguistic capacities, including reading. In fact, age is often cited as the cause of a decline in performance on such tasks. However, determining the social, psycho-social, and physiological status of subjects and applying…

Sees aging and health care as emerging policy issues in Third World. Discusses rationale for principal features of emerging new international survey design which includes integration of younger and older families; reliance on retrospective data; intensive measurement of economic status, health outcomes, and utilization and intergenerational…

Discusses the growing use by educational psychologists and teachers of developmental and academic behavior checklists. Identifies the minimum criteria necessary for checklists and criticizes their use as many fail to meet these standards. Describes the limitations, misuse, and narrow focus of behavior checklists. (GEA)

Evaluation of a middle school humanities program is the focus of this report. It explains how to identify information needs and set priorities, how to obtain information from a variety of sources, and what to do with the data collected in terms of formulating recommendations for the school board. The variety of evaluation approaches presented are…

This paper describes eight problems faced by a school district evaluator in evaluating state-funded, compensatory education programs: determining evaluation ownership, determining the major constraints, determining what to evaluate, determining what methods to use, determining participant characteristics, determining instrumentation, determining…