Level models of continuing professional development evaluation: a grounded review and critique

Continuing professional development (CPD) evaluation in education has been heavily influenced by ‘level models’, deriving from the work of Kirkpatrick and Guskey in particular, which attempt to trace the processes through which CPD interventions achieve outcomes. This paper considers the strengths and limitations of such models, and in particular the degree to which they are able to do justice to the complexity of CPD and its effects. After placing level models within the broader context of debates about CPD evaluation, the paper reports our experience of developing such models heuristically for our own evaluation practice. It then draws on positivist, realist and constructivist traditions to consider some more fundamental ontological and epistemological questions to which they give rise. The paper concludes that level models can be used in a number of ways and with differing emphases, and that choices made about their use will need to reflect both theoretical choices and practical considerations

Producing Evaluations in a Large Bureaucracy

The field of program evaluation has expanded rapidly over the past three decades so that evaluation of programs is standard practice in many government agencies. One development is that evaluation activities have moved inside large government agencies with the establishment of internal evaluation staffs, procedures and policies. This study examined empirically the development of evaluation issues and processes in one branch of the National Science Foundation in the USA. The study, which involved 3 years of intermittent participant-observation and 44 interviews, indicates that evaluations (in this office) are heavily influenced by the way the work is organized and produced, as well as by the usual considerations that shape evaluations elsewhere. In particular, this paper addresses two primary issues identified in the study as critical to the successful establishment of an evaluation office: (I) the evolution of an evaluation culture within the organization, and (2) the management of a semi-internal, semi-external evaluation production process

You and your MP

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:3864.42(41) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Mapping of River Alluvium Along the Verde River and Major Tributaries, Central Arizona

In 2010, the Arizona Geological Survey (AZGS) released a series of 1:24,000-scale geologic strip maps showing the extent of Holocene channel and floodplain deposits along the Verde River and five large tributaries in central Arizona. The primary purpose of this mapping was to contribute to the legal differentiation of river subflow from groundwater in surrounding areas, as Arizona courts have established the lateral extent of Holocene river alluvium as a key component in delineating subflow zones. These maps also define the physical architecture and geomorphic framework of the river systems, depicting river and tributary deposits of Holocene to late Pliocene age, Pliocene and older basin filling deposits, and various bedrock units. We employed standard geomorphic and geologic criteria to differentiate and map river and tributary alluvial deposits of different ages. The degree of clast rounding, lithologic diversity, and landform/terrace slope were used to differentiate river from piedmont alluvium.Poster presented at 2011 Geological Society of America Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, 9-12 October.Documents in the AZGS Document Repository collection are made available by the Arizona Geological Survey (AZGS) and the University Libraries at the University of Arizona. For more information about items in this collection, please contact [email protected]