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Session Title: A Role for Higher Education in Educational Evaluation
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Panel Session 834 to be held in Monterey on Saturday, Nov 5, 8:00 AM to 9:30 AM
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Sponsored by the Assessment in Higher Education TIG
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| Chair(s): |
| John Yun, University of California, Santa Barbara, jyun@education.ucsb.edu
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| Abstract:
Even as demands for research-based programs and rigorous evaluations are being made by governments and foundations across the country-state and local governments are forced to make cuts to essential educational/social services which have resulted in decreasing support for evaluations that inform critical educational decisions. This mismatch between the high expectations for evaluation to improve practice and the dwindling support for such work requires solutions.
Higher education must play a critical role in assisting the broader education sector in meeting these challenges. However, the details of these collaborations have been generally difficult to broker and manage over time. So while the potential of such collaborations is incredibly high, they have rarely been realized. In this session, through examples and argumentation, the University of California Educational Evaluation Center (UCEC) will propose a new framework for sustainability in this relationship to meet these myriad needs.
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Towards a Framework for Sustainability: The Role of Higher Education in Educational Evaluation
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| John Yun, University of California, Santa Barbara, jyun@education.ucsb.edu
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As we move into a new cycle of dwindling funds and increased expectations for what data-based evaluations can deliver, there is a need for a new framework for sustainability to guide institutions of higher education and their partners toward fruitful collaborative relationships. Issues such as turnover in the local educational groups, the political realities of educational institutions, and the traditional focus on grant-based research projects in higher education have created challenges and incentives that work against sustained and sustainable relationships. The need for a framework to guide local agencies and institutions of higher education through the process of developing stronger collaborative relationships and highlighting the potential benefits and challenges they may encounter is critical to fostering and ensuring that more sustained collaborations of this type are created and maintained. In this presentation, Dr. John Yun will provide the parameters of such a framework, and explore the various questions that still remain unanswered.
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Building Local Evaluation Capacity
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| Christina Christie, University of California, Los Angeles, tina.christie@ucla.edu
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Given the traditional role of institutions of higher education as propagators of knowledge and skills, it is clear that they have a key role to play as training grounds for the next generation of evaluation professionals. However, as the reality of dwindling budgets reduces the ability of educational organizations to solely rely on trained evaluation specialists, and given the more urgent need for evaluators to provide information that can be most effectively utilized within organizations, it may become necessary for colleges and universities to re-think the ways in which they work to facilitate the evaluation of programs and processes. Understanding the ways in which higher education can facilitate this transition towards useful evaluations is critical in this changing environment. Dr. Christina Christie will illustrate the multiple ways that she is working to understand and reshape this role.
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Sustainable Models of District-University collaboration
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| Julian Betts, University of California, San Diego, jbetts@ucsd.edu
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Dr. Julian Betts will discuss the eleven-year-old collaborative relationship that has developed between UC San Diego and the San Diego Unified School District, which is the second largest in California. He will summarize past and current research efforts and relevant policy findings. He will also discuss the formalization of this effort into the recently formed San Diego Education Research Alliance (SanDERA) and the elements that led to a stable and growing collaborative research relationship, which has now produced several noteworthy evaluations of education reform.
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Scaling Up: Higher Education in Evaluation for Policymaking
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| Michal Kurlaender, University of California, Davis, mkurlaender@ucdavis.edu
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While it is important for higher education to fulfill both its traditional role of training and knowledge generation and to explore new sustainable relationships with local districts and organizations to help generate both useful and rigorous evaluation studies in an environment of shrinking resources-it is also critical to find ways to work across districts and create viable economies of scale which will allow for the exploration of many different issues that arise across districts. This presentation will explore ways in which a system or consortium of colleges or universities can leverage their individual relationships to explore broader questions about teaching, learning, and program effectiveness, and to take advantages of the economies of scale that could emerge with the use of common assessments and the explorations of common questions.
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