This book uniquely captures program evaluation concepts, methods, and strategies that are most useful to nonprofit leaders, social science professionals, and students as they engage in evaluation practice. Readers will learn how to work with key stakeholders to determine answerable questions/design studies and analyze, interpret, and report useful findings.

Evaluation Practice for Collaborative Growth highlights the approaches, tools, and techniques that are most useful for evaluating educational and social service programs. This book walks the reader through a process of creating answerable evaluations questions, designing evaluation studies to answer those questions, and analyzing, interpreting, and reporting the evaluation's findings so they are useful and meaningful for key stakeholders. The text concludes with a chapter devoted to the shifting landscape of evaluation practice as it faces complex systems and issues that are shaped by society. Additionally, the author provides a list of knowledge and skills needed to adapt to a changing landscape and encourages organizations to use evaluation as a mechanism for learning and adapting to change. Her orientation toward community-based approaches and social justice prevail throughout the book's content and align well with a reader's desire to be inclusive and accountable in programing efforts. Nonprofit leaders, social science professionals, and students will find this book helpful for understanding basic program evaluation concepts, methods, and strategies.

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.

This particular case study is designed to explore the extent to which a teacher evaluation system is effective. It also addresses the challenge of measuring student achievement gains when the students in question are already at the high end of the scale, a different yet important—problem in an era when many concentrate on “low-hanging fruit” or students “on the bubble” between failure and marginal performance. By presenting a realworld case, various research methods for studying issues raised by the case, and the interchange among scholars engaged in this effort, this volume will allow educational policymakers and practitioners to decide if a proposed approach is compelling and relevant for their settings. Concurrently, a comparison of various research methods addressing a real school-based problem provides an important learning tool for the research community, and for those who study and make policy.We also believe that the case study and the research designs will be useful for those with responsibility for framing and funding a research agenda in education that utilizes strong research designs applied to topics that matter to student outcomes at all levels of the U.S. education system and at all levels of pupil performance. And finally, we hope that doctoral programs that seek to prepare the next generation of education researchers will find our approach helpful in their work.

To understand local responsibilities and requirements, one must also understand the role that regional and national governmental agencies and administrations play. Politics and Practices of Intergovernmental Evaluation is a landmark work in the area of the evaluation of intergovernmental policies, programs, and projects. Comparative and cross-national in its perspective, the material presented here not only provides a systematic theoretical and empirical treatment of intergovernmental evaluation, but does so with case material from seven nations and the European Union. No other such comparative work exists on this topic. Politics and Practices of Intergovernmental Evaluation will be of interest to political theorists, policy-makers, and scholars and students of government and the evaluation community.

This book is a collection of selected papers presented at the First International Conference on Industrial IoT, Big Data and Supply Chain (IIoTBDSC), held as an online conference due to COVID-19 (initially to be held in Macao, Special Administration Region (SAR) of China), during September 15–17, 2020. It includes novel and innovative work from experts, practitioners, scientists and decision-makers from academia and industry. It brings multi-disciplines together on IIoT, data science, cloud computing, software engineering approaches to design, development, testing and quality of products and services.

Outlining the principles J. Bradley Cousins and colleagues developed to guide collaborative approaches in evaluation, this text provides case studies for how these principles have then been applied in practice.