Measurement and Evaluation

David A. Erlandson, James Mc Namara, Maryanne Mc Namara

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138470996
• eBook ISBN: 9781317920267
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Written in a conversational style for principals who are not statisticians, this book will help you use measurement and evaluation to propel your school towards educational excellence.

1

INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

This book addresses the domain of Measurement and Evaluation, one of the twenty-one domains of knowledge and skill deemed necessary for the principalship by the National Policy Board for Educational Administration (Thomson, 1993).Its specific purpose is to help principals and others who assume leadership roles in the schools to better understand the importance of measurement and evaluation as a school improvement strategy.

This purpose is accomplished using six chapters that are organized into three parts. Throughout these chapters we illustrate our major themes with specific examples, knowing from the beginning that every school is different and that each requires different applications. Our illustrations are not intended as blueprints for what a particular school should do, but as clarification of basic measurement and evaluation principles that can be adapted to any school.

PART I: EVALUATION

Our task in the first part is to explain evaluation, and to support that explanation with research, theory, and exemplary practice ideas. Three chapters are dedicated to this task.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of what every principal should know about evaluation. Itbegins by defining what evaluation is and acknowledging that the purpose of evaluation is to improve the educational process. The central feature of this chapter is a specification and elaboration of The Program Evaluation Standards developed by the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation (1994). These standards describe both the ethical dimensions of evaluation (What is the purpose of evaluation? Is the evaluation likely to achieve that purpose? How can I trust evaluation not to harm anyone?) and what might be called the technical dimension of evaluation (How can I trust the evaluation to be accurate in its findings? Are conclusions drawn from the findings justifiable?).

Chapter 3 uses an exercise in collecting information to illustrate the different types of data that are available to the principal, the different strategies that may be used to collect them, and the different information uses to which they may be put.

This exercise simulates a basic information approach to decision making that can serve the principal in all aspects of school activity. Specifically, the principal always will be faced with questions such as: What do I need to know about the school? Where can I obtain the necessary information to tell me what I need to know? How can this information be used to facilitate my decisions? How can my decision-making activity be used to improve future decisions?

Chapter 4 focuses on structuring and scheduling program evaluation. In this chapter we illustrate how a principal may plan for and structure program evaluation, how a principal may schedule evaluations of various elements of the school’s total education program, and how these elements can be effectively related within the constraints of the school year. These illustrations are designed to demonstrate that effective administration of a comprehensive, integrated program evaluation is one of the most powerful leadership strategies that a principal can implement.

PART II: MEASUREMENT

The second part provides principals with an overview of basic measurement concepts, issues and strategies that have direct application on the job.

Chapter 5 accomplishes this by using a self-appraisal system. The system is constructed in a question and answer format. There are 30 questions that are organized into seven general sections. Each section reflects a primary area of basic measurement concerns. A complete inventory of questions is given in Appendix A.

Readers are encouraged to use this self-appraisal system as follows: First, read the question. Next, formulate a response. Finally, compare your response to the answer given in the book. Our answer for each question includes a direct reference to one or more basic references one can explore to get more detailed information. Thus, the appraisal systemalso provides a self-study guide principals can use to extend their knowledge and develop new skills.

PART Ill: APPLICATIONS

The third part explores ways in which principals can better relate measurement and evaluation to the real world of schools. The final two chapters are dedicated to this task.

Chapter 6 is explores ways that the measurement and evaluation expertise of professional colleagues can be used by school principals in collaborative problem solving. Such expertise resides in many school and community professionals. Among these are teachers, counselors, nurses, school psychologists, program evaluation specialists, curriculum coordinators, and social workers.

Although any of these professional colleagues could be our focus in this chapter, we chose to highlight how the professional expertise of school psychologists can be used in collaborative problem solving. Focusing on school psychologists has two primary advantages. First, it allows us to introduce a variety of school problems whose solutions typically involve the use of measurement and evaluation expertise. Second, this focus alerts school principals to the emerging interest among school psychologists in becoming more actively involved in school and classroom activities.

Chapter 7 references discussions of measurement and evaluation concerns in twelve other books already published in the School Leadership Library. Seven of these books addressed functional domains representing personal skills effective principals use on the job and five books addressed programmatic domains representing knowledge principals must have to develop specific decisions and effective courses of action.

The results of this content analysis and the summary of findings reported in Chapter 7 provide additional evidence to support two important ideas developed in the School Leadership Library. First, the findings support the idea that the twenty-one domains in the original NPBEA classification (Thomson, 1993) are not separate entities, but rather represent an efficient way to better understand the entire complex role of the school principal.

Second, examining the summary of findings for these twelve books contributes additional evidence to help readers better understand the importance of measurement and evaluation as a means to improve school leadership.

SUMMARY

All seven chapters of this book, dealing with the measurement and evaluation domain, were developed using the idea that principals exercise leadership both inside and outside the school by influencing others in the school community to join them in establishing an environment for school improvement. Using this collaborative approach, a school community becomes a dynamic learning organization dedicated to collectively searching for performance problems and committed to cooperatively implementing improvements that can be evaluated for effect.

PART I

EVALUATION

2

WHAT EVERY PRINCIPAL SHOULD KNOW ABOUT EVALUATION

In recent decades, as demands for accountability have grown, principals have become more and more familiar with evaluation. Teachers evaluate students, principals evaluate teachers, superintendents evaluate principals, and school boards evaluate superintendents. Beyond this, persons and groups outside the school district—state education agencies, the state legislature, and the local newspaper, to name a few—make their own evaluations of the educational productivity of the schools. As the emphasis on evaluation has increased, concerns about evaluation have also grown. How accurate are the findings of evaluations? How justified are the conclusions that are drawn from the findings? Once the evaluation is completed, how will the results be used? To what extent should they be used? Will the results be used for any useful purpose at all? What are the negative effects on people who are evaluated, and on other people involved in the evaluation? Is an evaluation worth the time, energy and money that are spent on it?

WHAT IS EVALUATION?

To answer these questions, we begin with an examination of what evaluation is. Michael Scriven, in his Evaluation Thesaurus (1991), notes that evaluation is “the process of determining the merit, worth and value of things, and evaluations are the products of that process” (p. 1). Using Scriven’s definition, we can say that merit is the intrinsic value of the person, object, or process being evaluated . A science teacher may exhibit merit as an outstanding teacher of advanced physics. By contrast, worth is the value of that person, object, or process to the institution or collective that its serves. The worth of our physics teacher will depend to some extent upon what classes she is assigned to teach, whether advanced physics is even taught in the school, and even the merit of her colleagues. Value represents both merit and worth. Clearly, when we consider the valuing of evaluation, we are concerned with both merit and worth.

THE PURPOSE OF EVALUATION

Having defined evaluation, we proceed to the question of the purpose of evaluation. Though a number of alternative answers may be given to this question, we take the position that the purpose of educational evaluation is to improve the educational process. We further suggest that this simplistic statement is not as self-evident as it may appear. Think for a moment, in terms of your own experience, of how evaluations are often not used for this purpose. Consider the process at different levels. What about elaborate end-of-course examinations that are given by some high school teachers? Do you know of any cases where the test results are not used, in any systematic way, either to prescribe future educational interventions for the students or to guide the course of future instruction? What about a principal’s evaluations of a better than average teacher? Do you know of any cases where that evaluation was not used to assist the teacher in continuing professional development? Do you know of any valid evaluation of an experimental program that was totally ignored when it came to time to decide on the continuation or discontinuation of the program? Can you think of any other examples?

Closely related to questions regarding the purpose and intend...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• FOREWORD
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
• PREFACE
• 1 INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW
• PART I: EVALUATION
• PART II: MEASUREMENT
• PART III: APPLICATIONS
• APPENDIX: SELF–APPRAISAL SYSTEM FOR MEASUREMENT
• REFERENCES