This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognizing you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
How can we improve evaluations used for special education programs?
Improving special education programs by improving program evaluations
Challenge
In recent years, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) has emphasized the use of evidence-based practices as well as research-driven accountability (RDA). This emphasis has become integral to OSEP’s assessment of its grant programs and of individual grantees.
For OSEP, Westat is providing the technical assistance that grantees and project officers need to ensure that program and project evaluations produce reliable, objective, and rigorous data that can be used to describe the projects’ achievements, help the projects improve, and demonstrate valid results.
Solution
We are providing the following assistance
- Developing evaluation-related tools and products—such as a tool to help projects demonstrate evidence of results, an evaluation toolkit, and guidelines for working with external evaluators—to help grantees and project officers better understand how to design and conduct high-quality evaluations
- Using webinars and conference presentations to share evaluation strategies and methods with grantees and project officers
- Offering an array of supports to help OSEP grantees with their evaluations
Results
OSEP grantees will be better able to
- Collect, report, analyze, and use high-quality data for project evaluations
- Design and conduct high-quality evaluations
OSEP project officers will be better able to
- Monitor the grantees’ progress and achievements
- Judge the effectiveness of their grant programs
Focus Areas
Education Educator Effectiveness Special EducationCapabilities
Evaluation and Mixed-Methods Research Partnership Engagement Technical AssistanceTopics
Equity K-12 LearningSenior Expert Contact
Tom Fiore
Vice President
-
Issue Brief
Young Children’s Consumption of 100% Fruit Juice by Racial-Ethnic Characteristics of Their MothersMarch 2023
Congress authorized the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) as a pilot program in 1972 and made WIC permanent in 1974.…
-
Perspective
CDISC Conformance and Compliance: So Many Resources, So Little Time!February 2023
Implementing the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) standards required for data management, programming, documentation, and eCTD data submission can be challenging for many reasons…
-
Expert Interview
How Will the Marine Corps Integrate Men and Women at Recruit Training?January 2023
Marine Corps recruit training is every bit as intense as it looks. Each morning starts hours before sunrise with a chorus of screaming drill instructors…