PROGRAM EVALUATION: NEW CONCEPTS, NEW METHODS

Abstract

The failure of many efforts to evaluate educational programs stems from a lack of understanding of the programs themselves. An educational program is a set of hierarchically arranged instructional experiences that interrelate to generate several well-defined terminal outcomes. The purpose of program evaluation is to revise, delete, modify, add to, or confirm the efficacy of these experiences. The key to understanding how and why a program brings about the outcomes it does lies in that program's hierarchical structure, or the way in which its components build upon one another to achieve outcomes greater than those that can be expected from any single part. It is the program evaluator's understanding {or misunderstanding) of this systematic interrelationship of components that often determines the utility and relevance of the evaluation to program developers and implementers. When evaluators fail to base their evaluation designs on a thorough understanding of program purpose and organization, their results and conclusions seldom address the needs which prompted the evaluation. Since their results and conclusions fail to integrate existing conceptions of the program, they cannot provide direction for program revision or modification. Need and Purpose of Decomposition A "components" view of an educational program assumes that behavior is generated or changed by specific, discrete instructional activities, and that the interrelationships among these activities build to more general behaviors at program completion. In any large-scale program that encompasses an almost endless array of instructional experiences , some activities can be expected to benefit program participants, some to hinder program participants, and still others to have no measurable effect upon them. The purpose of program evaluation is to assess the instructional activities that comprise the global program in a manner that makes possible the rendering of a judgment as to whether these activities should be revised, deleted, modified, unchanged, or supplemented with additional instructional components.