Prior to the initial administration of the Alabama High School Graduation Exam, this study was conducted to determine to what extent competencies to be measured by the exam were being taught in the public schools of Alabama.Teachers of grades 7, 8, 9, and 10 were asked to report the proportion of students in their classes who had received instruction on each competency. The survey identifies a number of competencies that were not being extensively taught and provides insight as to possible reasons certain competencies are not uniformly taught.
There can be almost unanimous agreement among those of us who are involved in the evaluation of educational programs in the public schools that there is a great need for the development of innovative methods of analyzing student achievement data for the purpose of program evaluation.Most persons charged with the responsibility of project or program evaluation come equipped with the tools of behavioral research. We have attempted to apply experimental and quasi experimental designs, hypothesis testing, and inferential statistics to developmental or on-going programs and have found these methods inadequate.In his 1970 review of the literature on measurement and analysis techniques in evaluation, Sjorgren (1970) concluded that exploration with the methodologies of other fields should have a high priority:... much work is needed in adapting the methods of the social and behavioral sciences to educational evaluation. The models of anthropology, economics, political sciences, sociology, law, and journalism need to be studied for their applicability to evaluation. Some of this analysis is occurring, e.g., cost-benefit analysis. It is clear, however, that the models are not immediately applicable to educational evaluation because many variables that are used in the basic discipline are not present or must be measured in another way in education. The problem of adapting such models to educational situations creates measurement problems of its own (p. 314).
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