High quality evaluation design, precise measurement, and effective use of emerging technology options for data collection and analysis are vital to accurate evaluation.

Materials accessed through this page provide information on evaluation design, methods and other issues in achieving high quality evaluation design and promoting responsible use.

The Evaluation Primer is a set of excerpts from Understanding Evaluation: The Way to Better Prevention Programs.

Measuring the Impacts of Whole School Reforms: Methodological Lessons From an Evaluation of Accelerated Schools.

Many educational improvement strategies, by design or by default, are implemented by entire schools rather than at the individual student or school level. This poses challenges to accurately measuring the impacts of such treatments on student achievement.

This methodological paper, introduces educational researchers to a new approach for measuring the impacts of whole school reforms. The approach is based on interrupted time-series analysis which has been used to evaluate programs in many fields but has not been widely used to study education initiatives. To help researchers use the approach, the paper lays out its conceptual rational, describes its statistical procedures, explains how to interpret its findings, indicates its strengths and limitations and illustrates how it was used to evaluate a major whole-school reform model. This paper by nationally known methodological expert, Howard Bloom, Chief Social Scientist of the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC) was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education.

PDF (353K) and MS Word MS Word (298K).