Community-based education programs must demonstrate effectiveness to various funding sources. The pilot study reported here (funded by CYFAR, NIFA, USDA award #2008-41520-04810) had the goal of determining if state level programs with varied curriculum could use a common evaluation tool to demonstrate efficacy. Results in parenting and youth…

New York's Cornell University spends millions of dollars and thousands of staff and volunteer hours to produce more than 1,400 events around the world each year. That's one event every six hours. Is it worth it? Do the 40,000 alumni, parents, and friends who attend feel closer to Cornell after these events? Do they disengage because Cornell didn't…

In their seminal paper, Edwards and Parry (1993) presented the polynomial regression as a better alternative to applying difference score in the study of congruence. Although this method is increasingly applied in congruence research, its complexity relative to other methods for assessing congruence (e.g., difference score methods) was one of the…

This collection of essays, "Literary Study, Measurement, and the Sublime: Disciplinary Assessment," edited by Donna Heiland and Laura J. Rosenthal, represents an important new venture in the Foundation's communication program. The book is the product of many authors, including the editors, both of whom have written essays for it. But it…

This article offers new directions in measuring racial isolation in schools. The most widely used measurement approach is to examine the mean on the distribution of school percentage non-White across non-White students (the isolation rate) or the percentage of non-White students in schools with large shares of non-Whites (e.g., 90% or more) at a…

Exhibitions are public demonstrations of mastery that occur at culminating moments, such as at the conclusion of a unit of study, the transition from one level of schooling to the next, and graduation. Exhibitions require students to speak publicly, use evidence, present engaging visual displays, and otherwise demonstrate mastery to educators,…

Digital learning makes possible the "unbundling" of school provisions--that is, it allows children to be served by providers from almost anywhere, in new and more customized ways. At the same time, because it destandardizes and decentralizes educational delivery, digital education is far harder to bring under the yoke of the…

Evaluative statements from alumni have legitimacy with both internal and external stakeholders. Thus, alumni studies can provide valuable evidence of institutional effectiveness and lend themselves to both locally designed and commercial survey instruments for data collection. Under ideal conditions, the results of alumni studies equip faculty and…

The 4Rs Program (Reading, Writing, Respect and Resolution) is a "dual focus" whole school universal intervention designed to promote literacy development and social-emotional learning, that is currently being rigorously evaluated using a school-randomized trial of 18 elementary schools (9 intervention, 9 control) in New York City. The…

This booklet of support materials is intended for use with the publication, "Manual for Evaluation of Occupational Education Programs." The support materials include the forms to be used in preparing for, conducting, and reporting upon the assessment of occupational education programs. Forms are to be reproduced locally. Section 1…

Previous studies of measurement of employment and unemployment have been conducted, but a similar statistical program on job vacancies could provide a more complete and accurate insight into the condition of the labor market for employers, placement agencies, counselors, and vocational education planners. This study tested the feasibility of…

Accurate measures of transfer are important to the assessment of community college outcomes. This article uses a relatively new database from the National Student Clearinghouse to assess transfer rates at the State University of New York community colleges. Past studies only tracked students within the public sector of a given state. Once…

The Plattsburgh French Language Immersion Program (FLIP) is designed to enrich the education of majority-group children. In discussing evaluation methodology for FLIP, the general problems of evaluating a program are discussed, as well as reactions to details of the design developed by the research group for FLIP. Evaluation is distinguished from…

This report reviews the progress made by the New York State Education Department and local school districts in developing and implementing a comprehensive student evaluation program for elementary and secondary education. With the assistance of local school district personnel and technical consultants, the department concentrated its efforts on…

A Performance Indicators in Education program has been developed in New York to serve both local and State needs. The performance of a school or school district may be defined as the difference between its actual output and its expected output. To obtain an equation for computing expected output, the academic status of students and a number of…