Evaluation Models is an up-to-date revision of the classic text first published in 1983. Organized in three sections, the first includes a historical perspective on the growth of evaluation theory and practice and two comparative analyses of the various alternative perspectives on evaluation. The second section includes articles representing the major schools of thought about evaluation written by the leaders who have developed these schools and models. The final section describes and discusses the Standards for Program Evaluation and the reformation of program evaluation.

Standardized testing in the United States has been increasing at a rapid pace in the last twenty-five years. The market for tests has not only been expanding rapidly, but has also been changing sharply in structure into a fractured marketplace. Indeed, one of the main features of this book is that the market for standardized testing is highly fractured - with segments of the market facing monopoly conditions, others facing oligopoly conditions and still others where near free-market conditions exist.
One of the main premises of the book is that the structures of markets have strong...

I personally learned to know Ralph Tyler rather late in his career when, in the 1960s, I spent a year as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. His term of office as Director of the Center was then approaching its end. This would seem to disqualify me thoroughly from preparing a Foreword to this "Classic Works. " Many of his colleagues and, not least, of his students at his dear Alma Mater, the University of Chicago, are certainly better prepared than I to put his role in American education in proper perspective. The reason for inviting me is, I...

The book's goal is to clarify for parents, the public, and policy makers what high stakes tests are and how their use affects our schools, children, and society. It explores the various uses, limitations, and paradoxical consequences of high stakes testing. The present context of testing and the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind make the proposed book timely and important. Current testing programs provide valuable information to teachers, parents, and policy-makers about students, schools, and school systems. But paradoxically, these programs have unintended yet predictable negative...

The book's goal is to clarify for parents, the public, and policy makers what high stakes tests are and how their use affects our schools, children, and society. It explores the various uses, limitations, and paradoxical consequences of high stakes testing. The present context of testing and the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind make the proposed book timely and important. Current testing programs provide valuable information to teachers, parents, and policy-makers about students, schools, and school systems. But paradoxically, these programs have unintended yet predictable negative...

Attempting fonnally to evaluate something involves the evaluator coming to grips with a number of abstract concepts such as value, merit, worth, growth, criteria, standards, objectives, needs, nonns, client, audience, validity, reliability, objectivity, practical significance, accountability, improvement, process, pro duct, fonnative, summative, costs, impact, infonnation, credibility, and - of course - with the tenn evaluation itself. To communicate with colleagues and clients, evaluators need to clarify what they mean when they use such tenns to denote important concepts central to their...

When George Bernard Shaw wrote his play, Pygmalion, he could hardly have foreseen the use of the concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy in debates about standardized testing in schools. Still less could he have foreseen that the validity of the concept would be examined many years later in Irish schools. While the primary purpose of the experimental study reported in this book was not to investigate the Pygmalion effect, it is inconceivable that a study of the effects of standardized testing, conceived in the 1960s and planned and executed in the 1970s, would not have been influenced by...

I personally learned to know Ralph Tyler rather late in his career when, in the 1960s, I spent a year as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. His term of office as Director of the Center was then approaching its end. This would seem to disqualify me thoroughly from preparing a Foreword to this "Classic Works. " Many of his colleagues and, not least, of his students at his dear Alma Mater, the University of Chicago, are certainly better prepared than I to put his role in American education in proper perspective. The reason for inviting me is, I...

Evaluation Models is an up-to-date revision of the classic text first published in 1983. Organized in three sections, the first includes a historical perspective on the growth of evaluation theory and practice and two comparative analyses of the various alternative perspectives on evaluation. The second section includes articles representing the major schools of thought about evaluation written by the leaders who have developed these schools and models. The final section describes and discusses the Standards for Program Evaluation and the reformation of program evaluation.