Evaluating Nonformal Education Programs and Settings

Evaluating Nonformal Education Programs and Settings PDF Author: Emma Norland
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 100

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume explores the issues with which evaluators of nonformal education programs (such as parks, zoos, community outreach organizations, and museums) struggle. These issues are not unique to nonformal programs and settings. Rather, they pose different sets of problems and solutions from those that face evaluators of traditional education programs. The authors address this topic from extensive experience as evaluators and education professionals who have worked in nonformal education settings. Billions of dollars are spent annually on nonformal, informal, and nontraditional education programs and collaborative formal-nonformal efforts. Public and private dollars fund literally thousands of programs, and yet the field of program evaluation has provided little guidance for evaluating such efforts. There are precious few resources available to lead program administrators, staff, and evaluators through the maze of programs with the diversity of the constituencies that support them. The stakeholders and audiences of nonformal education programs are numerous, and these programs can range from a one-shot, hour-long lecture to an ongoing, one-day-a-week volunteer program, to a three-week study tour, to a four-weekends-across-one-year-work camp, to a "stop by when you can" museum collection.

Evaluating Nonformal Education Programs and Settings

Evaluating Nonformal Education Programs and Settings PDF Author: Emma Norland
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 100

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume explores the issues with which evaluators of nonformal education programs (such as parks, zoos, community outreach organizations, and museums) struggle. These issues are not unique to nonformal programs and settings. Rather, they pose different sets of problems and solutions from those that face evaluators of traditional education programs. The authors address this topic from extensive experience as evaluators and education professionals who have worked in nonformal education settings. Billions of dollars are spent annually on nonformal, informal, and nontraditional education programs and collaborative formal-nonformal efforts. Public and private dollars fund literally thousands of programs, and yet the field of program evaluation has provided little guidance for evaluating such efforts. There are precious few resources available to lead program administrators, staff, and evaluators through the maze of programs with the diversity of the constituencies that support them. The stakeholders and audiences of nonformal education programs are numerous, and these programs can range from a one-shot, hour-long lecture to an ongoing, one-day-a-week volunteer program, to a three-week study tour, to a four-weekends-across-one-year-work camp, to a "stop by when you can" museum collection.

Evaluation of Nonformal Education Programs

Evaluation of Nonformal Education Programs PDF Author: Richard J. Shavelson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 186

Get Book Here

Book Description
UNESCO pub. Description of the criteria sampling approach to evaluation of nonformal education - applies the approach to case studies of basic literacy in Indonesia and teacher training programmes in Nigeria and Guyana; analyses the approach, incl. Identification of training objectives, analysis of textbooks and tests.

Completing Your Evaluation Dissertation, Thesis, or Culminating Project

Completing Your Evaluation Dissertation, Thesis, or Culminating Project PDF Author: Tamara M. Walser
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 1506399991
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Get Book Here

Book Description
This practical, user-friendly resource helps students successfully complete an evaluation capstone: a dissertation, thesis, or culminating project where a student conducts an evaluation as their capstone experience. Authors Tamara M. Walser and Michael S. Trevisan present a framework to support students and faculty in maximizing student development of evaluator competencies, addressing standards of the evaluation profession, and contributing to programs and disciplinary knowledge. Their framework, and this book, is organized by six fundamentals of evaluation practice: quality; stakeholders; understanding the program; values; approaches; and maximizing evaluation use. Throughout the book they use the metaphor of the journey to depict the processes and activities a student will experience as they navigate an evaluation capstone and the six fundamentals of evaluation practice. In pursuit of a completed capstone, students grow professionally and personally, and will be in a different place when they reach the destination and the capstone journey is complete.

Enduring Issues in Evaluation: The 20th Anniversary of the Collaboration Between NDE and AEA

Enduring Issues in Evaluation: The 20th Anniversary of the Collaboration Between NDE and AEA PDF Author: Sandra Mathison
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Get Book Here

Book Description
This issue of New Directions for Evaluation looks back at the past twenty years of the American Evaluation Association, from its inception to current research, highlighting important moments and enduring issues in the discipline and profession of evaluation. The issue includes a very brief history of NDE--including the journal's purpose, the various foci, how the journal has operated, and such events as the change in the journal's name. The issue also looks at the substance of NDE over the past twenty years, including an analysis of the coverage of cultural diversity issues. But much of the issue is devoted to "greatest hits" chapters that have appeared in prior NDE issues, each of which is introduced by an analysis of what makes it a significant contribution to the evaluation literature. The American Evaluation Association (AEA) celebrated its twentieth birthday in 2006. The partnership between AEA and New Directions for Evaluation has spanned this time and indeed stretches back further to AEA's precursor associations, the Evaluation Research Society and ENet. This is the 114th volume of the quarterly report series New Directions for Evaluation, a publication of Jossey-Bass and the American Evaluation Association.

Evaluation in Nonformal Education

Evaluation in Nonformal Education PDF Author: David C. Kinsey
Publisher: University of Massachusetts, Center for International Education
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 42

Get Book Here

Book Description
Abstract: Techniques for adapting evaluation methods to satisfy the needs of nonformal education are designed for use by the program practitioner. The problems associated with traditional evaluation procedures are described: a focus on outcomes rather than process improvement; a lack of applicability to the nonformal context; and the creation of a costly and disruptive situation within the program. Existing adaptations to various methodologies are discussed in terms of formative evaluation, nonformal education settings, and practitioner use. The criteria for selecting the adaptive process are based on: skill, time, and cost factors; amount of disruption engendered; degree of utility; setting of practical standards; allowance for non-quantifiable indicators; and amount of flexibility to meet program constraints. The approaches to adapting evaluation procedures may be incremental, extractive, or participative, or they may be decision-making or option-oriented. Other considerations include creating a favorable atmosphere and training for practitioner evaluation.j).

Peace Education Evaluation

Peace Education Evaluation PDF Author: Celina Del Felice
Publisher: IAP
ISBN: 1623969751
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book Here

Book Description
Practice and research of peace education has grown in the recent years as shown by a steadily increasing number of publications, programs, events, and funding mechanisms. The oft-cited point of departure for the peace education community is the belief in education as a valuable tool for decreasing the use of violence in conflict and for building cultures of positive peace hallmarked by just and equitable structures. Educators and organizations implementing peace education activities and programming, however, often lack the tools and capacities for evaluation and thus pay scant regard to this step in program management. Reasons for this inattention are related to the perceived urgency to prioritize new and more action in the context of scarce financial and human resources, notwithstanding violence or conflict; the lack of skills and time to indulge in a thorough evaluative strategy; and the absence of institutional incentives and support. Evaluation is often demand-driven by donors who emphasize accounting given the current context of international development assistance and budget cuts. Program evaluation is considered an added burden to already over-tasked programmers who are unaware of the incentives and of assessment techniques. Peace education practitioners are typically faced with forcing evaluation frameworks, techniques, and norms standardized for traditional education programs and venues. Together, these conditions create an unfavorable environment in which evaluation becomes under-valued, de-prioritized, and mythologized for its laboriousness. This volume serves three inter-related objectives. First, it offers a critical reflection on theoretical and methodological issues regarding evaluation applied to peace education interventions and programming. The overarching questions of the nature of peace and the principles guiding peace education, as well as governing theories and assumptions of change, transformation, and complexity are explored. Second, the volume investigates existing quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods evaluation practices of peace educators in order to identify what needs related to evaluation persist among practitioners. Promising practices are presented from peace education programming in different settings (formal and non-formal education), within various groups (e.g. children, youth, police, journalists) and among diverse cultural contexts. Finally, the volume proposes ideas of evaluation, novel techniques for experimentation, and creative adaptation of tools from related fields, in order to offer pragmatic and philosophical substance to peace educators’ “next moves” and inspire the agenda for continued exploration and innovation. The authors come from variety of fields including education, peace and conflict studies, educational evaluation, development studies, comparative education, economics, and psychology.

Nonformal Education

Nonformal Education PDF Author:
Publisher: Goodwill Trading Co., Inc.
ISBN: 9789715740135
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Get Book Here

Book Description


International Handbook of Research on Environmental Education

International Handbook of Research on Environmental Education PDF Author: Robert B. Stevenson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136699309
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 578

Get Book Here

Book Description
The environment and contested notions of sustainability are increasingly topics of public interest, political debate, and legislation across the world. Environmental education journals now publish research from a wide variety of methodological traditions that show linkages between the environment, health, development, and education. The growth in scholarship makes this an opportune time to review and synthesize the knowledge base of the environmental education (EE) field. The purpose of this 51-chapter handbook is not only to illuminate the most important concepts, findings and theories that have been developed by EE research, but also to critically examine the historical progression of the field, its current debates and controversies, what is still missing from the EE research agenda, and where that agenda might be headed. Published for the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

The Changing Landscape of Youth Work

The Changing Landscape of Youth Work PDF Author: Kristen M. Pozzoboni
Publisher: IAP
ISBN: 168123565X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
The purpose of this book is to compile and publicize the best current thinking about training and professional development for youth workers. School age youth spend far more of their time outside of school than inside of school. The United States boasts a rich and vibrant ecosystem of Out?of?School Time programs and funders, ranging from grassroots neighborhood centers to national Boys and Girls Clubs. The research community, too, has produced some scientific consensus about defining features of high quality youth development settings and the importance of after?school and informal programs for youth. But we know far less about the people who provide support, guidance, and mentoring to youth in these settings. What do youth workers do? What kinds of training, certification, and job security do they have? Unlike K?12 classroom teaching, a profession with longstanding – if contested – legitimacy and recognition, “youth work” does not call forth familiar imagery or cultural narratives. Ask someone what a youth worker does and they are just as likely to think you are talking about a young person working at her first job as they are to think you mean a young adult who works with youth. This absence of shared archetypes or mental models is matched by a shortage of policies or professional associations that clearly define youth work and assume responsibility for training and preparation. This is a problem because the functions performed by youth workers outside of school are critical for positive youth development, especially in our current context governed by widening income inequality. The US has seen a decline in social mobility and an increase in income inequality and racial segregation. This places a greater premium on the role of OST programs in supporting access and equity to learning opportunities for children, particularly for those growing up in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty. Fortunately, in the past decade there has been an emergence of research and policy arguments about the importance of naming, defining, and attending to the profession of youth work. A report released in 2013 by the DC Children and Youth Investment Corporation suggests employment opportunities for youth workers are growing faster than the national average; and as the workforce increases, so will efforts to professionalize it through specialized training and credentials. Our purpose in this volume is to build on that momentum by bringing together the best scholarship and policy ideas – coming from in and outside of higher education – about conceptions of youth work and optimal types of preparation and professional development.

Collaborative Evaluations in Practice

Collaborative Evaluations in Practice PDF Author: Liliana Rodríguez-Campos
Publisher: IAP
ISBN: 1623969905
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Get Book Here

Book Description
One of the reasons some groups are more effective than others is collaboration; people implement evaluative decisions more willingly if they have collaborated on those decisions. This book introduces real-world applications of the Model for Collaborative Evaluations (MCE) in business, nonprofit, and education to make collaborative evaluations more accessible to you. The MCE is a systematic framework that revolves around a set of six interactive components specific to conducting a collaborative evaluation. It represents a practical attempt to capture the essence of collaborative evaluation from various perspectives in order to offer a valuable understanding of different stances that often arise when using this type of approach. A multidisciplinary team of authors enriches the diverse perspectives of this book with their international and cross-cultural expertise. The intention is to share a deeper understanding of how this approach is applied to build collaborative relationships within an evaluation, recognizing the level of collaboration will vary in each situation.