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All Publications & Resources |
Challenges in Evaluating Comprehensive School-Linked Services: Toward a More Comprehensive Evaluation Framework
Presented at the 1995 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, this paper discusses the evaluation challenges facing complex school-linked services and describes and assesses how 18 such initiatives have been evaluated. Includes detailed charts and tables.
Children and Youth
This issue of The Evaluation Exchange is devoted to the evaluation of youth programs that support positive youth development. Topics include evaluating strength-based approaches to youth development, youth participation in evaluation, lessons learned from the international community on evaluating youth programs, and foundation grantmaking for children and youth.
Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Social Inquiry
Book chapter on using mixed methodology in the social sciences. In B. Somekh & C. Lewin (Eds.), Research methods in the social sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Community-Based Initiatives
This issue provides a broad overview of the status of evaluations of community-based initiatives (CBI) and begins an ongoing dialogue among practitioners, evaluators, and funders about how to address the challenges involved in evaluating them.
Community-Based Initiatives
This issue of The Evaluation Exchange, Harvard Family Research Project's quarterly evaluation periodical, investigates community-based initiatives (CBIs). It offer a variety of viewpoints, perspectives, and practices on how to document and examine CBIs in a way that enables us to learn all we can about them.
Complementary Learning
The topic of this issue of The Evaluation Exchange is complementary learning. Complementary learning posits that we can bolster children's learning and achievement by linking and aligning both the school and nonschool arenas in which children live, learn, and play. This means, for example, linking schools with early childhood programs, out-of-school time programs, and other programs based in the community. In this issue we delve into the kinds of mechanisms that can create these linkages and sustain their effectiveness, and highlight promising approaches for evaluating the complementary-learning practices that already exist, both in terms of what outcomes to focus on and what methodologies to use.
Current Issue - Scaling Impact
This issue of The Evaluation Exchange explores the promising practices and challenges associated with taking an enterprise to scale, along with the role that evaluation can and should play in that process. It is the second in our “hard-to-measure” series, which we inaugurated with our Spring 2007 issue on evaluating advocacy.
Data Sharing Resources for Afterschool and Expanded Learning Programs and Systems
This resource highlights tools, publications, and reports that provide examples of promising practices for and guidance on data sharing for afterschool and expanded learning programs and systems.
Democratic Evaluation
This issue of The Evaluation Exchange periodical focuses on democratic evaluation. At the forefront of the discussion are equity and inclusion in the evaluation of programs for children, families, and communities, as well as evaluation to promote public accountability and transparency. Katherine Ryan leads off the issue by presenting major theoretical approaches to democratic evaluation. Several contributors examine these different strands, highlighting the importance of power sharing. Jennifer Greene emphasizes the importance of broad inclusion of stakeholder perspectives in evaluations, while Saville Kushner offers guidelines for people and communities to help evaluation reposition itself as a collaborative effort and thereby begin to address the crisis in public trust between the professional bureaucracy and citizens. Kathleen McCartney and Heather Weiss focus on public accountability, especially the conduct of flagship evaluations to maintain their scientific integrity while also serving the public good. Several contributors provide practical methods and tools to promote democratic evaluation, including the facilitation of dialogue, the training of youth researchers, the use of photovoice and cell phone technology, and access to interactive information through the Internet.
Detangling Data Collection: Methods for Gathering Data
This Snapshot describes the common data collection methods used by current out-of-school time programs to evaluate their implementation and outcomes.
Documenting Progress and Demonstrating Results: Evaluating Local Out-of-School Time Programs
A collaboration with the Finance Project, this brief provides practitioners of local out-of-school time programs with techniques, tools, and strategies for improving their program and tracking their effectiveness over time.
Early Childhood Programs and Evaluation
This issue of The Evaluation Exchange charts the course of early childhood programming and evaluation over nearly half a century. Contributing authors offer a range of views on how best to communicate the importance of investing in a child’s early years and how to improve early childhood programs and policies. Several articles consider the explosion of science—from longitudinal studies of child outcomes to a large-scale demonstration program—that has helped forward our understanding of how young children learn and grow. Finally, a number of articles suggest that better information is needed to close the persistent gap in achievement between children from low-income families and those from middle-income homes.
Engaging Adolescents in Out-of-School Time Programs: Learning What Works
This article examines both the incentives and barriers that affect adolescents' participation in out-of-school time programs.
Engaging With Families in Out-of-School Time Learning
This Snapshot provides an overview of how researchers are evaluating out-of-school time programs’ engagement with families.
Evaluating Community-Based Initiatives
Many lessons have been learned during the past decade of community building; this issue of The Evaluation Exchange explores many of these lessons and their implications. Articles by experienced and insightful authors discuss a number of critical issues now surfacing in this field, including innovations in community-building evaluation, the role of cultural competency in community-based research and evaluation, and how evaluators and funders can better build on the evaluation and learning approaches that community-based organizations already use to improve their work.
Evaluating Education Reform
Education reform is complex and so are its evaluations. This issue of The Evaluation Exchange explores key dimensions of reform, including standards-based reform, technology in education, Comer schools, and new forms of public accountability. It addresses the links among education policy, practice, and evaluation and how research and evaluation can inform policy and practice.
Evaluating Education Reform: Early Childhood Education
Over the past three decades, an enormous body of research literature has been amassed on early childhood education, parent education, and family support programs. This review summarizes these three areas of research and reports on relevant research in progress.
Evaluating Family Involvement Programs
This issue of The Evaluation Exchange brings together the current knowledge base of programs in family support and family involvement, providing a continuous perspective on family processes with regard to children's learning and development, from a child's early years through adolescence. Articles address the challenges of evaluating family programs, such as the need for conceptual clarity, methodological rigor, accountability, and contextual responsiveness. Rounding out the issue are examples of ongoing evaluations of parent leadership and organizing to ensure that schools serve all children at high standards.
Evaluating Family Support: Thinking Critically, Thinking Internationally (Keynote Address)
Evaluation plays a major role in shaping new directions for the field of family support. In her keynote address at the Participatory Evaluation and Parent Engagement Institute, sponsored by Family Support America and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, in Kansas City, Missouri, September 20–22, 2004, Heather Weiss, Founder and Director of HFRP, described how evaluation can support learning, continuous improvement, and innovation. The four components of a family support evaluation strategy that she outlined were experimental studies to show program impact on families, utilization-focused evaluation to support policy and practitioner decision making, action research and empowerment evaluation, and performance standards based on solid research and evaluation.
Evaluating Municipal Out-of-School Time Initiatives
To inform municipal leaders who are developing out-of-school time evaluations, HFRP scanned the city-level initiatives in its evaluation profiles database and prepared this short brief that describes the evaluation approaches, methods, and performance measures that some cities are using for evaluation.
Evaluating Out-of-School Time
This is the third issue of The Evaluation Exchange (Harvard Family Research Project's quarterly evaluation periodical) devoted to exploring the challenges and solutions associated with evaluating out-of-school (OST) programs. This issue includes articles on what we know from existing research and evaluation about the results that are possible from OST programming, expert commentary on what the future OST research and evaluation agenda should look like, and information about hands-on research and evaluation tools and resources. It is also includes a special report with expert commentary on the implications of the first year findings in Mathematica's evaluation of the national 21st Century Community Learning Centers program. To read the previous issues on out-of-school time, go to our issue archive.
Evaluating Out-of-School Time Program Quality
This issue of The Evaluation Exchange is the fourth devoted to exploring issues in the out-of-school time (OST) field. Its focus is assessing and improving the quality of out-of-school time and youth development programs. Articles cover innovative methodologies and new technology systems for assessing quality, strategies for recruitment and retention, and understanding and measuring participation.
Evaluating School-Linked Services
This issue of The Evaluation Exchange, Harvard Family Research Project's quarterly evaluation periodical, focuses on how to evaluate school-linked services.
Evaluating School-Linked Services: Considerations and Best Practices
Nine evaluators of school-linked services programs identify considerations and best practices related to evaluating outcomes, sustainability, and collaboration to help determine how school-linked services programs work, what their impact is, and whether they should be expanded.
Evaluation for Continuous Improvement
This issue of The Evaluation Exchange examines the use of evaluation for continuous improvement. It incorporates advice from well-known experts, such as Paul Light, Rosalie Torres, and Joe Wholey, outlines innovative evaluation practices, and provides insights into the evaluations of a wide range of initiatives.