Recent legislative and school reform efforts require schools to evaluate and improve educational practices for students with severe disabilities. The authors developed the "Program Quality Measurement Tool" (PQMT) to enable administrators and educators to evaluate the educational programming provided to students with severe disabilities against…

Analyzed were the results of 18 extended school year programs in the state of Washington.

Concurrent use of two direct observation instruments (momentary time sample of task engagement and event recording of discrete student responses) were evaluated in six middle school resource rooms using either of two reading programs. Findings tended to be program specific with differences lost or diluted when data were combined across programs.…

A comprehensive three-level program evaluation plan assesses overall impact of early intervention programs through assessment of children's progress toward developmental milestones; quarterly child progress through administration of a program-relevant, criterion-referenced tool; and weekly child progress toward specific instructional objectives by…

Existing evidence on the Milwaukee Project, an early intervention effort with preschool disadvantaged children, suggests a decline of the experimental children to the level of the untreated controls in those measures, such as school reading, not under the control of the project. (DB)

A conceptual perspective and set of principles are offered for the evaluation of special service programs in public school settings. Special service program evaluation is seen as a process of obtaining and reporting information on a program's adequacy, process, efficiency, and impact. (Author)

Drawing on H.R. Davis' A VICTORY model of factors associated with organizational change, the article argues that accepted models of educational evaluation will be most useful with programs for mainstreaming handicapped children when they are expanded to include critical factors associated with organizational acceptance and successful…

Thirty-five studies on the efficacy of special class versus regular class placement for mildly handicapped students were reviewed for the power of their statistical tests. Twenty-one studies had adequate power to detect a large effect size but the power to detect a medium effect size was no better than chance. (Author/DB)

This paper discusses dynamic/interactive approaches to psychological assessment based on the concept of induced change as a research tactic. Studies are reviewed showing how interactive assessment has yielded new knowledge in psychopathology; neuropsychology; learning disabilities; intelligence testing (in normal, deaf, and immigrant children);…