Group items tagged

By Nicoletta Stame, in journal Evaluation 10 (1): pp. 58-76, 2004. An examination of theory-based evaluations. This page contains only the abstract. The full article is available for a fee, or you may be able to obtain through your local library's document delivery services.

Impact evaluations are important because they provide evidence about what works and does not work. It looks at what caused the improvement, or lack there of. This article from the Center for Effective Philanthropy talks about evaluation from the policy, practice, as well as philanthropy perspective.

Posted by Rick Davies to Monitoring and Evaluation NEWS (blog). No date, but note that this is updated from a May 2007 version published on another of Davies' blogs. From abstract, "Evolving storylines is a participatory method of developing multiple alternative views of the future, or interpretations of the past, in the form of branching stories." Davies describes the process, where each participant is both creating and evaluating the work of his/her peers.

Online Writing Evaluation Service

By Kevin Carey, Commentary in The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 11, 2011. Community Colleges will now have an opportunity to vie for a top prize. "The Aspen Institute is awarding the first annual Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence, with the winner and up to three runners-up sharing in the $1-million prize fund." Among the 10 finalists, Aspen Institute's evaluators conducted site visits and looked closely at employment outcomes, teaching practices and student learning. "The best community colleges, they found, were focused and intentional when it came to structuring the learning experience."

By Evan Weissman, Dan Cullinan, Oscar Cerna, Stephanie Safran and Phoebe Richman, with Amanda Grossman. National Center for Postsecondary Research (NCPR) Teachers College Columbia University. February 2012. Link to full report at the bottom of the summary on this page. The colleges in this study are two of six in the NCPR Learning Communities Demonstration, in which random assignment evaluations are being used to determine the impacts of learning communities on student success. NCPR has presented finding from all six colleges. They show that when one-semester learning communities have impacts, they tend to be concentrated in the semester in which students are enrolled in the program. Another report, a final one will be released in 2012. That report synthesizes the findings across all colleges studied and includes an additional semester of student follow-up at each college.

By Clifford Adelman, Senior Research Analyst, U.S. Dept of Education, 1999. This article is included in the literature review conducted by SRI (evaluation team) for the summer 2010 Institute. For access to the full monograph, see link in first paragraph.

Full text of this article is available in GSCC Polilogue. Login required.

Produced by commoncraft, Aug 6 2007. This video describes social bookmarking in a fun and decidedly low-tech fashion. Runtime is just over 3 minutes. Please note that this video is for sale, though it is possible to watch an evaluation copy, for free, from this URL.

from evaluation proposal

COMPASS is an untimed, computerized test that helps evaluate skills for placement into appropriate courses. Created by ACT.

Part of Carnegie Mellon University, the Open Learning Initiative is, like GSCC, the recipient of a Gates Foundation technology-related grant. The grant is "for the collaborative development, use, evaluation, and continuous improvement of web-based open learning environments for high-demand "gatekeeper" courses" (from Gates Foundation press release).

on the Testing Center, York College - The City University of New York. Five scoring categories: 1. "Critical Response to the Writing Task and Text" 2."Development of Writer's Ideas": 3. Structure of the Response" 4. "Language Use: Sentences and Word Choice" 5. "Language Use: Grammar, Usage, Mechanics"

"This article provides a rationale for incorporating the development of critical thinking skills into the online learning environment. The author also presents possibilities for building these cognitive skills into online classes. She maintains that incorporating critical thinking skills is a necessary component of learning; these skills assist learners to evaluate and link the abundance of information and ideas that is available via information communication technologies (ICTs). "

The American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges was founded in 1974. It is the only organization exclusively devoted to providing a national forum for the improvement of mathematics instruction in the first two years of college.

By Heather Kanuka, chapter 4 of Theory and Practice of Online Learning, ed. Terry Anderson, published by Athabasca University, 2E, 2008. The author suggests that, before evaluating whether new e-learning technologies work, it is important to reflect upon philosophies of technology and education.

By Anya Kamenetz in the Education column of GOOD magazine (Online), August 29 2011. The idea behind the Edupunk concept is a DIY approach to education in order to make education truly student-driven, and to make good use of the great variety of resources available on the Internet. To that end, Kamenetz, author of The Edupunk's Guide (a free ebook) offers these ideas regarding online research.

Much as the Edupunk movement fails to value the importance of a good teacher to guide and support the student's learning experience, this post fails to take librarians and libraries into account. That said, there are some great sites and sources on this list, though no mention of how students should evaluate the accuracy, currency, or authority of these sites. What do you think?

On YouTube, uploaded by researchtutorials

R.O. Lesson 13, Semester 2