Evaluation management requires a system for measuring, improving, and accounting for quality. The Institute for Program Evaluation in the United States General Accounting Office is developing such a system. (Author)

Evaluation synthesis, a meta-evaluation method developed by the General Accounting Office to improve evaluation utilization by legislators, is described. It is designed to: (1) focus on the information needs and priorities of legislators, and (2) ensure continuous communication between sponsor and evaluator. The strengths and limitations of this…

This fact sheet compares the history of fiscal resources for research and development in the Department of Education with budget histories of research and development in other departments and agencies of the Federal Government. The correspondence between administration budget requests and congressional appropriations for education research and…

This document reports preliminary conclusions from the General Accounting Office's (GAO) assessment of the effects of existing federally produced information on education in the United States which focused on the quality, availability, and dissemination of information on selected education topics. Issues guiding the GAO's work included: (1) how…

In 1991 the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) released a report interpreting the achievement of U.S. students in mathematics on the 1990 National Assessment of Educational Progress in terms of a set of performance standards. The NAGB had been designing and implementing an approach to defining basic, proficient, and advanced levels of…

The General Accounting Office (GAO), at the request of the House Committee on Education and Labor, Subcommittee on Elementary, Secondary, and Vocational Education, conducted studies on the extent and cost of testing in the United States, the experience of Canada in testing, and initial efforts to set standards for judging student performance on…

This letter is an interim response to the October 7, 1991 request from the Committee on Education and Labor and the Subcommittee on Elementary, Secondary, and Vocational Education of the House of Representatives asking for a review of the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) achievement levels for the National Assessment of Educational…

The results, and their implications, of research described in the report "Education Information: Changes in Funds and Priorities Have Affected Production and Quality" are discussed. Prepared by the General Accounting Office (GAO), the above research report covered selected years between 1973 and 1986. High-quality information on…

The politics of program evaluation are discussed from the personal perspective of the Director of the General Accounting Office's Program Evaluation and Methodology Division, which has produced reports for committees of the United States Congress. It is concluded that successful evaluations must be useful to others and must understand the…

This testimony reports on the state of program evaluation in the field of drug education for youth. The report focuses on the role of evaluation in: (1) the Department of Education's program of grants to states and local school districts under the Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act (DFSCA) of 1986, as amended; (2) the department's Drug-Free…