Lessons learned about collaborative evaluation using the Capacity for Applying Project Evaluation (CAPE) framework with school and district leaders

Schools, districts, and state-level educational organizations are experiencing a great shift in the way they do the business of education. This shift focuses on accountability, specifically through the expectation of the effective utilization of evaluative-focused efforts to guide and support decisions about educational program implementation. In as much, education leaders need specific guidance and training on how to plan, implement, and use evaluation to critically examine district and school-level initiatives. One specific effort intended to address this need is through the Capacity for Applying Project Evaluation (CAPE) framework. The CAPE framework is composed of three crucial components: a collection of evaluation resources; a professional development model; and a conceptual framework that guides the work to support evaluation planning and implementation in schools and districts. School and district teams serve as active participants in the professional development and ultimately as formative evaluators of their own school or district-level programs by working collaboratively with evaluation experts. The CAPE framework involves the school and district staff in planning and implementing their evaluation. They are the ones deciding what evaluation questions to ask, which instruments to use, what data to collect, and how and to whom results should be reported. Initially this work is done through careful scaffolding by evaluation experts, where supports are slowly pulled away as the educators gain experience and confidence in their knowledge and skills as evaluators. Since CAPE engages all stakeholders in all stages of the evaluation, the philosophical intentions of these efforts to build capacity for formative evaluation strictly aligns with the collaborative evaluation approach.     

Evaluation of a school-based sexual abuse prevention curriculum in Malaysia

This article examines a personal safety curriculum (Keeping Me Safe) offered to Standard Three students (mostly nine-year-olds) in five primary schools in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Staff of the Malaysian NGO, Protect and Save the Children, Association of Selangor and Kuala Lumpur (P.S. The Children), facilitated six weekly one-hour sessions featuring games and role play to teach children about potentially unsafe situations and touches, and to develop appropriate safety strategies and skills to ask for help. The students (n = 261) and a control group (n = 184) completed a 25 item questionnaire before and after the program, and for the experimental group only, again two months later. The assessment was supplemented by observations of each session, student interviews, and parent and teacher focus groups. The experimental group students showed substantial gains on about two-thirds of the questionnaire items. However, a minority of the students failed to absorb key messages of the curriculum. Challenges to implementing prevention programs in Malaysia are discussed.     

Interface of drug use

Packaging and labeling play a crucial role awhile protecting medicaments and transmitting a range of crucial information to the users. Taking into account the scarcity of specific studies in this area, it was considered great the need for a comprehensive survey about customers' satisfaction when handling these containers.     

Review of walking hazards for railroad workers

This is a review of walking tasks in the railroad environment, and the injuries that result from slips, trips, falls, or other acute or even non-traumatic exposures. The lack of federal regulations for railroad walkways has led several states to develop and enforce their own regulations. Support from the research literature for such regulations has come from biomechanical studies of the effects of walking on railroad ballast, which will be reviewed.     

Youth emancipation and perceived job insecurity of parents and children

We test whether job insecurity of parents and children affect children’s moving-out decisions. Macroeconomic estimates for 13 European countries over 1983–2004 show that coresidence increases by 1.7 percentage points (PP) following a 10 PP rise in the share of youths perceiving their job to be insecure and declines by 1.1 PP following the same increment in insecurity for older workers. Microeconometric evidence for Italy in the mid-1990s shows that the probability of moving out increases by about half a percentage point for a one-standard-deviation increase in paternal insecurity and by one-third of a percentage point for a one-standard-deviation decrease in children’s insecurity.     

An Overview of and Rationale for Changes Proposed for Pathological Gambling in DSM-5

The fifth revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) is scheduled for publication in 2013. It will include several changes to the diagnosis of pathological gambling: the name of the disorder will be altered, the threshold for diagnosis will decrease, and one criterion will be removed. This paper reviews the rationale for these changes and addresses how they may impact diagnosis and treatment of the disorder, as well as potential for future research in the field.     

Negotiating Solidarity: Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and the ‘NGO-ization’ of Postcolonial Narrative

This essay examines the relationship between transnational non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and postcolonial disasters as represented in literature. After the 1990s expansion of humanitarian organizations, a wide array of NGO-related literature emerges, including depictions of aid workers in fiction as well as humanitarian-authored narratives. While these texts contain a capacity for self-critique typically lacking in transnational NGO campaign materials, they remain mired in a ‘bureaucratic imagination’, sequestered from supposed beneficiaries. Alongside this literary development is an increasing pressure on postcolonial fiction to align with narrowly defined NGO missions, or what might be called an ‘NGO-ization of postcolonial narrative’. This essay interprets Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People as a vociferous refutation of such humanitarian pressure. Sinha stages the interaction between subaltern survivor and humanitarian benefactor not in terms of heroic salvation or radical rejection but as a conditional and negotiated solidarity. Disaster thus creates an opportunity to reimagine the subaltern-humanitarian relationship.     

Continuity of Mental Health Care Across Military Transitions

Multiple deployments, a prominent characteristic of operations Enduring Freedom, Iraqi Freedom, and New Dawn, have been linked to increased risk for various mental health conditions. It is also well known that military transitions, such as a change of duty station or discharge, are an inevitable part of military life. While military transitions can be stressful for any service member or veteran, those with mental health conditions face additional challenges. Transition stress can exacerbate a mental health condition that in turn hinders ability to manage the transition, resulting in a cycle of stress. As a result, those receiving mental health care while transitioning often experience difficulty continuing treatment post-transition. This article describes a unique and innovative transition coaching program designed to address this emerging issue.     

Identifying Mental Disorder from the Faces of Women with Borderline Personality Disorder

Although appearance-based cues can help to diagnose physical illness, visual manifestations of mental disorder may be more elusive. Here, we investigated whether individuals could distinguish women with a serious mental disorder (borderline personality disorder) from demographically- and IQ-matched non-psychiatric controls. Participants rated mentally ill targets as more likely to have a mental disorder from photos more accurately than chance, despite not believing that such judgments were possible. The configuration of facial cues played an important role in these judgments, as interfering with the spatial relationships between facial features reduced participants’ accuracy to chance guessing. Further investigation showed similar results when participants rated the targets for specific mental disorders (borderline personality disorder, major depressive disorder) and rated the mentally ill targets as more depressed, angry, anxious, disgusted, emotionally unstable, distressed, and less happy. Moreover, the depression ratings significantly correlated with the targets’ actual depressive symptoms. Thus, individuals may be able to infer aspects of mental disorder from minimal facial cues.