Barry Macdonald

The evaluation of the humanities curriculum project: A holistic approach

This paper is in the nature of an interim report on an evaluation exercise that has run half its course. It outlines the characteristics of the curriculum intervention being evaluated, the impact of that intervention upon the educational system, and the attempt to design an appropriate evaluation. If my account is sometimes cryptic and impressionistic, it is because I have tried to convey in a limited time both the nature of its empirical roots and the span of its concerns. The Humanities Curriculum Research and

How Education Became Nobody's Business

Abstract Political control has yielded a compulsory school curriculum of mindnumbing sterility, devoid of educational imagination or intelligence, and enforced by a crude technology. How did this come to be the outcome of a century of mass education, mass democracy, and social research? Where do educators and educational researchers go from here?

Racism and Educational Evaluation

The evaluation of educational programmes is a fast developing branch of educational research, one which is beginning to assume some of the characteristics of a discipline in its own right, as well as of a profession and a service industry. In the short span of forty years since the American Ralph Tyler initiated formal evaluation theory, the construction of a definitive paradigm has preoccupied many of those drawn to the topic either by its (presumed) social utility, its intellectual charm or its profitability (one private American firm has an estimated annual income of sixteen million dollars). British investment in such studies has so far been modest in scale but there are signs, both in the current rhetoric of the sponsoring bureaucracy and in the rising temperature of educational politics, of an imminent boom.

Teaching Race in Schools: Some Effects on the Attitudinal and Sociometric Patterns of Adolescents

GAJENDRA K. VERMA is Senior Research Associate, and BARRY MACDONALD Director of the Evaluation Unit, in the Centre for Applied Research in Education, University of East Anglia. The study was financed by the Schools Council. Readers of this journal will be aware that the field of race teaching, while much discussed, has received scant attention from psychometric research. Were this not the case, there might be no place here for the results of a rather limited attempt to measure the effects on race attitudes and perceptions of a brief exposure to a particular teaching approach. Rather than summarize previous research, ad hoc reference will be made in the course of this article to particular studies which influenced it or produced comparable data. It is, however, necessary to outline the context in which the study was set up, and the rationale of the experimental treatment to which the subjects were exposed. _

Making a start: the origins of a research programme

Abstract The authors are conducting an independent policy evaluation of the ESRC‐funded ‘Information Technology in Education Research Programme’ (InTER). The four‐year evaluation (1988‐92) in the first instance addressed the origins of the Programme and the processes of selection that led to the setting up of four consortia. The consortia projects are ‘Groupwork with Computers’ (Co‐directors: Michael Eraut and Celia Hoyles), ‘Tools for Exploratory Learning’ (Co‐directors Joan Bliss and Jon Ogborn), and ‘Conceptual Change in Science’ (Co‐ordinators Ros Driver and Eileen Scanlon). The Programme costs £1.1 million. The first report of the evaluation considers the circumstances in which these consortia emerged as winners from the 99 applicants for InTER funding. It also seeks to understand how the Programme emerged from the policy‐forming deliberations and committee structures of the ESRC. The study (which was fully negotiated with the participants) tries to combine a series of narratives that tell personal, ...