Counseling Programs: A Guide to Evaluation (Essential Tools for Educators series)

If you think you don′t have time to evaluate your school counseling programs, think again. Now you can save time and avoid the frustration of conducting an evaluation that does not provide relevant or valid information. Best of all, with this new guide, you don′t need advanced courses in research design or sophisticated research statistics. As funding for education dwindles, you need to evaluate your programs on an ongoing basis to document the needs of students, teachers, and parents, as well as the effectiveness of your programs. Through a series of mini case studies that illustrate the evaluation process from start to finish, the authors show you how to use evaluations to improve the quality of your programs, how to document resources necessary for improvement, and how to become convincing advocates for your services and, in effect, improve your professional life. This book is part of a seven-volume series for evaluating programs and services in today′s K-12 schools. The "master plan" for this series is found in Evaluating School Programs: An Educator′s Guide by James R. Sanders. It describes the steps involved in conducting the evaluation, including ways to focus the evaluation, identify specific evaluation questions, and collect, organize, analyze, and report the information. All volumes in the series, including this one, are designed to be mutually complementary and used in conjunction with Evaluating School Programs.