The historical roots of current educational assessment practices are traced, exploring assessment in the generic sense rather than as educational measurement. Our culture of assessment developed long ago, predating the history of educational measurement. Current inefficiencies in education and faults in school life may have grown with this…

Three eras in the history of examining outcomes of education are described, and a new approach labeled as "assessment" is characterized as a postmodern era of achievement testing. This era is marked by increasing the teacher's authority to evaluate achievement and questioning the relevance of certain psychometric principles of evaluation. (SLD)

Evaluation as a discipline requires knowledge based on: empirical evidence; public verification; and usefulness in various settings and contexts. Activities which aid in accumulating this knowledge include: compliance with federal requirements; critiques and secondary data analyses; impact and use studies; comparative field studies; and…

Assessment generally refers to large-scale, system-wide measurement programs for pupil diagnosis; pupil certification; program evaluation; research; accountability; resource allocations; or teacher evaluation. The purpose of assessment should determine the test content, construction, administration, and examinees sampled. Assessment methods for…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the various decisions associated with evaluation, provide some sort of structure and terminology for them, and then determine where (within this structure) the crucial value judgments lie. One result of such analysis will be a definition of evaluation. (Author/CTM)

Differences among impartiality, objectivity, partisanship, fanaticism, and skepticism are viewed as relevant to the role of the evaluator. The desirability of establishing a community of minds committed to argumentation before beginning an evaluation is suggested. (Author/CTM)

Transactional evaluation is discussed in the perspective of "The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation" by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca. It is described as a procedure for facilitating change by encouraging all persons who might be affected by a new program to participate in its evaluation. (CTM)

This is an introduction to the six following articles, which discuss three people's views of evaluation in the perspective of "The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation" by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, a book that contrasts argument and persuasion with reason and reasoning. (See TM 504 631-636). (CTM)

Evaluation as a process of obtaining and providing useful information for making educational decisions is discussed with reference to the concepts expressed in "The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation." The need for the evaluator to know the approaches, interests, and values of the decision maker is discussed. (CTM)

The author discusses recent changes in his thinking about evaluation, decision making, and authority and finds the notion of a logical, rational, synoptic decision process to be hardly defensible. (CTM)

The evaluation methods of "naturalistic inquiry" and of "judicial evaluation" support the importance of argumentation; but "The New Rhetoric; A Treatise on Argumentation" focuses on the technique of argument and neglects the problems of judging the merits of conflicting arguments and of harnessing argumentation to productive ends. (CTM)

The Judicial Evaluation Model (JEM) is presented as a necessary supplement to the technique developed in "The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation" because persuasion only serves the side that wins, whereas JEM serves to keep inquiry reasonable and impartial and to enhance credibility. (CTM)

Evaluation theory building is described as depending on intellectual tradition and on thorough knowledge of the work that has been done recently in evaluation projects. (CTM)

This essay discusses principles which govern evaluation theorizing, describing theorizing as a subjective, informal, and dynamic process. The papers of Rippey, Guba, and Wolf are used to illustrate the process of theory development, with special reference to evaluation as rhetoric. (See TM 504 630-635). (CTM)

Although "quality of education" issues are currently popular in educational evaluation, the author argues for an empirically resolvable evaluation paradigm: Given the target population, program goals, and boundary conditions, how do educational treatments compare in terms of learning effects? Agreement on pre-set specifications and the "logic" for…