An Investment Prospectus: Strengthening Education and Democracy through Service-Learning

Service-learning has deep roots in many American reforms, traditions, and disciplines. The cooperative extension movement in higher education, the settlement house work of Jane Addams, the pedagogies of John Dewey, the freedom schools of the African-American community: all these types of experiential education have connected young people to their communities as does service-learning. Service-learning is a teaching method that engages young people in community problem-solving as part of their education, both in school and out-of-school settings

Putting theory oriented evaluation into practice

Evaluations of gaming simulations and business games as teaching devices are typically end-state driven. This emphasis fails to detect how the simulation being evaluated does or does not bring about its desired consequences. This paper advances the use of a logic model approach which possesses a holistic perspective that aims at including all elements associated with the situation created by a game. The use of the logic model approach is illustrated as applied to Simgame, a board game created for secondary school level business education in six European Union countries

Evaluating community-based health programs that seek to increase community capacity

Central to most community-based programs is the goal of improving the community's capacity to address its own problems. Evaluating changes in community capacity requires contextualized definitions that (1) respect geographic, political, academic, and community perspectives and (2) inclusive evaluation approaches.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/35230/1/1144_ftp.pd

How to build up the actionable knowledge base: the role of 'best fit' framework synthesis for studies of improvement in healthcare.

Increasing recognition of the role and value of theory in improvement work in healthcare offers the prospect of capitalising upon, and consolidating, actionable lessons from synthesis of improvement projects and initiatives. We propose that informed use of theory can (i) provide a mechanism by which to collect and organise data from a body of improvement work, (ii) offer a framework for analysis and identification of lessons learnt and (iii) facilitate an evaluation of the feasibility, effectiveness and acceptability of improvement programmes. Improvement practitioners can benefit from using an underpinning external structure as a lens by which to examine the specific achievements of their own projects alongside comparable initiatives led by others. We demonstrate the utility of a method known as 'best fit framework synthesis' (BFFS) in offering a ubiquitous and versatile means by which to collect, analyse and evaluate improvement work in healthcare. First reported in 2011, BFFS represents a pragmatic, flexible approach to integrating theory with findings from practice. A deductive phase, where a review team seeks to accommodate a substantial part of the data, is followed by an inductive phase, in which the team explores data not accommodated by the framework. We explore the potential for BFFS within improvement work by drawing upon the evidence synthesis methodology literature and practical examples of improvement work reported in BMJ Quality and Safety (2011-2015). We suggest four variants of BFFS that may have particular value in synthesising a body of improvement work. We conclude that BFFS, alongside other approaches that seek to optimise the contribution of theory to improvement work, represents one important enabling mechanism by which to establish the rigour and scientific credentials of the emerging discipline of 'improvement science'