Jody Fitzpatrick

A Case Study of Measuring Outcomes in an MPA Program

Abstract Many MPA programs are struggling to identify ways to evaluate their outcomes. This paper describes the development and implementation of a method for assessing student learning outcomes in the MPA program at the University of Colorado Denver. The multi-method approach makes use of rubrics to examine whether students demonstrate the desired knowledge and skill, and student surveys to describe students’ perceptions of their abilities in the same areas. Means for gaining faculty commitment to the process and making use of the information for program improvement are discussed.

Evaluation of the Fun With Books Program An Interview With Katrina Bledsoe

This section presents interviews with evaluators whose work can illustrate, in a specific evaluation study, the application of different models, theories, and principles described in evaluation literature. These interviews should also exemplify the choices that evaluators make in the course of planning and conducting an evaluation. Entries in this section will begin with a brief description of the evaluation to provide a foundation for the interview. The focus will be on the dialogue between the section editor and the evaluator to learn more about the choices made, the models followed, the constraints and opportunities that emerged as the study progressed, and the evaluators assessment of the study itself. The section editor will provide commentary as needed to point out important attributes of the evaluation itself and to highlight connections between the evaluators comments and relevant literature or issues in the field of evaluation. Please send any suggestions about evaluators/evaluations that might be the subject of this column to the section editor, Christina A. Christie, at tina.christie@cgu.edu.

Comparative Public Administration: Review of the Literature and Agenda for Future Research

Intensified globalization and the demands on government that are created by it make studying public administration comparatively – how the field is defined, how comparative issues are framed, what subjects are addressed, and what research designs and methods of data collection and analysis are employed – a timely and worthwhile endeavor. To assess the nature and scope of the field of Comparative Public Administration (CPA), this paper identifies and codes for content 69 articles published in refereed journals between 2005 and 2009 that are comparative in nature, that is, the article must concern two or more geographical regions. This could be across nations (at national or subnational level), groups of nations (OECD, G8) or across continents. To be included among the 69, the article must also be relevant for public administration. Four significant attributes of the articles that were coded are highlighted here. First, a majority of the articles referenced the context of institutions or administrative processes, and the major subjects that frequently organized an article were reform, including New Public Management, and budgeting and finance. Second, these comparative public administration articles were dominated by studies of the United States and Europe. Third, three of our every four articles in our sample either attempted to establish linkages between independent and dependent variables or described those variables. In slightly more than one of every four articles that we examined authors tested causal relationships among variables. Fourth, the vast majority of articles that we coded for content made use of existing or secondary data; interview and survey data were rarely used. Furthermore, we found that 15 percent of the authors in our sample used sophisticated statistical methods. In slightly more than half of the articles qualitative methods were used. Among other things, the uses of theory, method, and data in the 69 CPA articles published between 2005 and 2009 differ markedly from how they were used in the published journal articles that Van Wart and Cayer (1990) coded for content twenty years ago. The paper concludes with a set of seven recommendations for future comparative public administration research.