Models and Methods for Evaluation

This chapter situates the evaluation of technologybased programs in the context of the field of general educational program evaluation. It begins with an overview of the main evaluation approaches developed for general educational programs, including Tyler’s early conception of assessing attainment of program objectives, decision-making approaches, naturalistic evaluation, and Kirkpatrick’s four levels for evaluating program effectiveness. Following this is an overview of commonly used technology-specific program evaluation criteria and frameworks. Strategies distilled from these two fields are then suggested for evaluating technology-based learning programs. These strategies emphasize clarifying the goal or purpose of the evaluation and determining the information needs of the intended audiences of the evaluation at the beginning of the project. This, in turn, suggests the most appropriate evaluation methodology to be used. The chapter concludes with a description of tools that can be used for analysis of evaluative data, followed by a brief discussion of the dissemination of evaluation results.