Author: Satu Kalliola Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1443859222 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
This book is one of the first of its kind to bring together a variety of perspectives on evaluation from a multidisciplinary international perspective. The book, with its content derived from leading experts in their chosen fields of practice, illustrates the potential of evaluation to demonstrate the impact and efficiency of social interventions. Examples are given of comparative effectiveness research, realist evaluation, and systematic reviews, as well as of holistic and authentic evaluation, the use of advisory groups, and qualitative needs assessment. The volume also presents some special evaluation tools used by national governments and which are used to influence a variety of professional practices. The key features of the book are: • An international panel of experts sharing the expertise in evaluation. • Multiple perspectives on evaluation theory, methodology and practices articulated through a range of interdisciplinary perspectives. • A primary focus on client-, patient-, and, more generally, human-centredness. • Practical examples of contrasting evaluation methods in use. • Helpful tips and advice offered throughout. The book is compiled from the work of the plenary speakers, plenary panel and selected workshop presentations at the 8th International Conference on Evaluation for Practice, Eval2012, held in Finland in 2012. The contributors come from Australia, Brazil, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Norway, the Republic of Korea, the UK, and the USA. In line with the traditions of the conference series, some contributions here are joint endeavours from academics and practitioners. Evaluation as a Tool for Research, Learning and Making Things Better is recommended for both academics and practitioners, and will be useful for individual researchers, researcher communities and students, who are interested in and conduct evaluation research in various contexts, including as part of service development programs, and for public and private organizations which pursue good service quality with an impact.
Author: Thomas R. Guskey Publisher: Corwin Press ISBN: 9780761975618 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 332
Book Description
Explains how to better evaluate professional development in order to ensure that it increases student learning, providing questions for accurate measurement of professional development and showing how to demonstrate results and accountability.
Author: Grant P. Wiggins Publisher: ASCD ISBN: 1416600353 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 383
Book Description
What is understanding and how does it differ from knowledge? How can we determine the big ideas worth understanding? Why is understanding an important teaching goal, and how do we know when students have attained it? How can we create a rigorous and engaging curriculum that focuses on understanding and leads to improved student performance in today's high-stakes, standards-based environment? Authors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe answer these and many other questions in this second edition of Understanding by Design. Drawing on feedback from thousands of educators around the world who have used the UbD framework since its introduction in 1998, the authors have greatly revised and expanded their original work to guide educators across the K-16 spectrum in the design of curriculum, assessment, and instruction. With an improved UbD Template at its core, the book explains the rationale of backward design and explores in greater depth the meaning of such key ideas as essential questions and transfer tasks. Readers will learn why the familiar coverage- and activity-based approaches to curriculum design fall short, and how a focus on the six facets of understanding can enrich student learning. With an expanded array of practical strategies, tools, and examples from all subject areas, the book demonstrates how the research-based principles of Understanding by Design apply to district frameworks as well as to individual units of curriculum. Combining provocative ideas, thoughtful analysis, and tested approaches, this new edition of Understanding by Design offers teacher-designers a clear path to the creation of curriculum that ensures better learning and a more stimulating experience for students and teachers alike.
Author: National Research Council Publisher: National Academies Press ISBN: 0309293227 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 383
Book Description
Education is a hot topic. From the stage of presidential debates to tonight's dinner table, it is an issue that most Americans are deeply concerned about. While there are many strategies for improving the educational process, we need a way to find out what works and what doesn't work as well. Educational assessment seeks to determine just how well students are learning and is an integral part of our quest for improved education. The nation is pinning greater expectations on educational assessment than ever before. We look to these assessment tools when documenting whether students and institutions are truly meeting education goals. But we must stop and ask a crucial question: What kind of assessment is most effective? At a time when traditional testing is subject to increasing criticism, research suggests that new, exciting approaches to assessment may be on the horizon. Advances in the sciences of how people learn and how to measure such learning offer the hope of developing new kinds of assessments-assessments that help students succeed in school by making as clear as possible the nature of their accomplishments and the progress of their learning. Knowing What Students Know essentially explains how expanding knowledge in the scientific fields of human learning and educational measurement can form the foundations of an improved approach to assessment. These advances suggest ways that the targets of assessment-what students know and how well they know it-as well as the methods used to make inferences about student learning can be made more valid and instructionally useful. Principles for designing and using these new kinds of assessments are presented, and examples are used to illustrate the principles. Implications for policy, practice, and research are also explored. With the promise of a productive research-based approach to assessment of student learning, Knowing What Students Know will be important to education administrators, assessment designers, teachers and teacher educators, and education advocates.
Author: National Research Council Publisher: National Academies Press ISBN: 0309072778 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 233
Book Description
Economic, academic, and social forces are causing undergraduate schools to start a fresh examination of teaching effectiveness. Administrators face the complex task of developing equitable, predictable ways to evaluate, encourage, and reward good teaching in science, math, engineering, and technology. Evaluating, and Improving Undergraduate Teaching in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics offers a vision for systematic evaluation of teaching practices and academic programs, with recommendations to the various stakeholders in higher education about how to achieve change. What is good undergraduate teaching? This book discusses how to evaluate undergraduate teaching of science, mathematics, engineering, and technology and what characterizes effective teaching in these fields. Why has it been difficult for colleges and universities to address the question of teaching effectiveness? The committee explores the implications of differences between the research and teaching cultures-and how practices in rewarding researchers could be transferred to the teaching enterprise. How should administrators approach the evaluation of individual faculty members? And how should evaluation results be used? The committee discusses methodologies, offers practical guidelines, and points out pitfalls. Evaluating, and Improving Undergraduate Teaching in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics provides a blueprint for institutions ready to build effective evaluation programs for teaching in science fields.
Author: National Research Council Publisher: National Academies Press ISBN: 0309175445 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 102
Book Description
Effective science teaching requires creativity, imagination, and innovation. In light of concerns about American science literacy, scientists and educators have struggled to teach this discipline more effectively. Science Teaching Reconsidered provides undergraduate science educators with a path to understanding students, accommodating their individual differences, and helping them grasp the methodsâ€"and the wonderâ€"of science. What impact does teaching style have? How do I plan a course curriculum? How do I make lectures, classes, and laboratories more effective? How can I tell what students are thinking? Why don't they understand? This handbook provides productive approaches to these and other questions. Written by scientists who are also educators, the handbook offers suggestions for having a greater impact in the classroom and provides resources for further research.
Author: Tom Bennett Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135040273 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 177
Book Description
‘Tom Bennett is the voice of the modern teacher.’ - Stephen Drew, Senior Vice-Principal, Passmores Academy, UK, featured on Channel 4’s Educating Essex Do the findings from educational science ever really improve the day-to-day practice of classroom teachers? Education is awash with theories about how pupils best learn and teachers best teach, most often propped up with the inevitable research that ‘proves’ the case in point. But what can teachers do to find the proof within the pudding, and how can this actually help them on wet Wednesday afternoon?. Drawing from a wide range of recent and popular education theories and strategies, Tom Bennett highlights how much of what we think we know in schools hasn’t been ‘proven’ in any meaningful sense at all. He inspires teachers to decide for themselves what good and bad education really is, empowering them as professionals and raising their confidence in the classroom and the staffroom alike. Readers are encouraged to question and reflect on issues such as: the most common ideas in modern education and where these ideas were born the crisis in research right now how research is commissioned and used by the people who make policy in the UK and beyond the provenance of education research: who instigates it, who writes it, and how to spot when a claim is based on evidence and when it isn’t the different way that data can be analysed what happens to the research conclusions once they escape the laboratory. Controversial, erudite and yet unremittingly entertaining, Tom includes practical suggestions for the classroom throughout. This book will be an ally to every teacher who’s been handed an instruction on a platter and been told, ‘the research proves it.’
Author: Roger Kaufman Publisher: Corwin Press ISBN: 1483334279 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
"Roger Kaufman and his colleagues have produced what is simply the best practical book on educational evaluation published in the past few years. It is current, clearly written, and structured in a way that educators can apply it in a huge variety of educational contexts." -Richard Clark, Professor University of Southern California "As an evaluation book written for educators and education, this publication delivers on its promise. It provides a practical, professional, and comprehensive approach for planning and conducting evaluation studies that are meaningful and effective for understanding and improving the education enterprise." -Dale W. Lick, Professor College of Education, Florida State University, Tallahassee "The book describes how to ask and answer the right questions in order to measure the gaps in results and their consequences...Readers will be able to custom tailor an evaluation plan for their specific situations. Practical examples and scenarios along with how-to-do-it guides show readers how to apply the concepts and tools presented." -James D. Russell, EdD, Professor, Visiting Research Associate Educational Psychology and Learning Systems Institute Florida State University, Tallahassee "This book puts evaluation in a framework of societal needs, while simultaneously being results-oriented and practical. This is a unique combination of ′how to′ with ′why′ that is of immense importance in the present time when the public value of education seems to have been lost ...(while) citizens also demand specifics." -Elizabeth D. Capaldi, Vice Chancellor & Chief of Staff State University of New York Use program evaluations to define measurable results and deliver meaningful outcomes! Finding a straightforward approach to educational evaluations is the most important step toward discovering and reporting the meaningful results underlying the hard work of education. Kaufman, Guerra and Platt present program evaluation as a trouble-free process that any educator can effectively complete while providing the evidence required to justify and validate any educational endeavor. Drawing from the education, business, and military fields, this accessible resource shows educators, administrators, politicians, learners, and parents how to distill evaluations to uncover what works and what doesn′t. Practical Evaluation for Educators breaks down the program evaluation process into four easy-to-understand steps: Align and direct evaluation questions into useful queries aimed at the intended results of educational programs Observe to gather pertinent, valid, and useful data Compare the results of what was accomplished to what was planned to be accomplished Use the data by taking action and adjusting programs to bring them into alignment with societal needs When educators see evaluation as a simple, useful tool for improving programs, measurable results become meaningful.
Author: Marvin C. Alkin Publisher: Guilford Publications ISBN: 1462532438 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 345
Book Description
Thoroughly revised and updated, this engaging text has given thousands of students and new evaluators the practical information and expert advice needed to conduct or use evaluations. In 26 concise sections, the book describes how to articulate answerable evaluation questions, collect and analyze data using both quantitative and qualitative methods, and deal with contingencies that might alter the traditional sequence of an evaluation. Special strengths of the text are its attention to individual, organizational, and community culture and emphasis on building collaborative relationships with stakeholders. An in-depth case study and related end-of-section exercises (including group activities) help students put themselves in the evaluator role. Other pedagogical features include section titles written as questions, bulleted recaps of each section, "Thinking Ahead" and "Next Steps" pointers, cautionary notes, and suggestions for further reading. New to This Edition *New and expanded topics: evaluation contracts, budgeting, surveys, data visualization, qualitative coding and memoing, factors affecting evaluation use, and context-sensitive evaluation. *Revised case study with extended exercises that guide the reader to complete a simulated evaluation. *End-of-section "Quick Read" links to recommended American Evaluation Association blog posts. *Four entirely new sections (such as "How Do You Strengthen Relationships with Stakeholders?" and "How Do We Plan a Process-Focused Evaluation Design?"), plus other changes and additions throughout.
Author: Management Association, Information Resources Publisher: IGI Global ISBN: 1522576649 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 2231
Book Description
In a diverse society, the ability to cross communication barriers is critical to the success of any individual personally, professionally, and academically. With the constant acceleration of course programs and technology, educators are continually being challenged to develop and implement creative methods for engaging English-speaking and non-English-speaking learners. Computer-Assisted Language Learning: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications is a vital reference source that examines the relationship between language education and technology and the potential for curriculum enhancements through the use of mobile technologies, flipped instruction, and language-learning software. This multi-volume book is geared toward educators, researchers, academics, linguists, and upper-level students seeking relevant research on the improvement of language education through the use of technology.
Author: Satu Kalliola
Author: Thomas R. Guskey
Author: Grant P. Wiggins
Author: National Research Council
Author: National Research Council
Author: National Research Council
Author: Tom Bennett
Author: Roger Kaufman
Author: Marvin C. Alkin
Author: Management Association, Information Resources