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Parenting programmes are seen as feasible and cost-effective in preventing early behavioural problems in children and adolescents. A number of studies have concluded that such programmes are effective in reducing child problem behaviours and improving the skills and well-being of parents. Nevertheless, less is known about long-term programme effects. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A non-meta-analytic discussion.

Long-term evaluations of parenting programmes suffer from a number of methodological weaknesses resulting in an inability to make robust causal inferences about child and parent outcomes in the longer term. The current evidence is favourable but is likely to be biased by methodological weaknesses. There is a need for more studies of greater methodological strength to obtain conclusive evidence that would guide empirical research, practice and policy.

The paper discusses weaknesses in long-term evaluations of parenting programmes and highlights concrete future directions towards improving the quality of study design, evaluation and data analysis.

Accounting Education Change Commission reveals that accounting professionals are required to have interpersonal skills. For this reason, higher education requires the dynamics of learning that can foster critical thinking skills, analysis, communication, negotiation, cooperation and argumentation. Therefore, studies in the field of accounting education have led to a project approach to provide students with complex learning experiences to develop various supporting skills in addition to learning outcomes. Interestingly, the methods have its own dilemma with social loafing in groups. Therefore, a lecturer must be able to match it with an appropriate evaluation instrument. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of implementing peer evaluations and project-based learning (SMEs project) on improving the interpersonal skills of accounting students.

The population of this research is Accounting students at Medan State University, while the sample is students who are undergoing Cost Accounting courses taken with purposive sampling. The within-sample of field experiment method was conducted in the current study. Furthermore, data analysis was performed using one-way ANOVA analysis assisted by SPSS 19.

The results of this study showed that students had an increase in interpersonal skills in their board, and peer-evaluation design resulted in learning satisfaction and fairness in students.

The results of this study produce practical recommendations for lecturers to innovate their learning activities with actual project design and control group dynamics with accommodative evaluation designs. This study provides new insights in building a comprehensive instructional design, so it can strengthen the concept of instructional and evaluation designs which are integral parts that should match between one another.

The main objective of this paper is to review work on the usability and impact of digital libraries.

Work on the usability and impact of digital libraries is reviewed. Specific studies on the usability and impact of digital libraries in specific domains are also discussed in order to identify general and specific usability and impact measures.

The usability studies reviewed in this paper show that a number of approaches have been used to assess usability. In addition to the technical aspects of digital library design (e.g. architecture, interfaces and search tools), there are a number of usability issues such as globalisation, localisation, language, culture issues, content and human information behaviour. Digital libraries should, however, be evaluated primarily with respect to their target users, applications and contexts.

Although a digital library evaluation study may have several objectives, ranging from the evaluation of its design and architecture to the evaluation of its usability and its impact on the target users, this paper focuses on usability and impact.

This paper provides insights into the state‐of‐the art in relation to the usability and impact of digital libraries.

This chapter explores the relevance of critical race theory (CRT) and queer theory to the relational aspects of program evaluation. Often conceptual binaries that undergird traditional evaluation theory and practice (e.g., internal versus external evaluation, subjective versus objective analysis, observation versus intervention, and insider versus outsider positionalities) adversely influence rigid social roles between evaluator and participant limit a study's effectiveness in supporting programs for equity in contemporary school districts. To illustrate this approach, an array of problems within a program evaluation of a district-wide ethnic studies reform initiative is presented. Approaches to these challenges rooted in tenets of CRT and queer theory illustrate how the district was able to clarify goals and develop an effective implementation plan that focused on effective ethnic studies curriculum and pedagogy.

The purpose of this study is to carry out a systematic literature review for evidence-based assessment of the effectiveness of thesaurus in digital information retrieval systems. It also aimed to identify the evaluation methods, evaluation measures and data collection tools which may be used in evaluating digital information retrieval systems.

A systematic literature review (SLR) of 344 publications from LISA and 238 from Scopus has been carried out to identify the evaluation studies for analysis, and 15 evaluation studies have been analyzed.

This study presents evidences for the effectiveness of thesaurus in digital information retrieval systems. Various methods for evaluating digital information systems have been identified. Also, a wide range of evaluation measures and data collection tools have been identified.

The study was limited to the literature published in English language and indexed in LISA and Scopus. The evaluation methods, evaluation measures and data collection tools identified in this study may be used to design more cognizant evaluation studies for digital information retrieval systems.

The findings have significant implications for the administrators of any type of digital information retrieval systems in making more informed decisions toward implementation of thesaurus in resource description and access to digital collections.

This study extends our knowledge on the potentials of thesauri in digital information retrieval systems. It also provides cues for designing more cognizant evaluation studies for digital information systems.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how to apply traditional information retrieval (IR) evaluation methods based on standards from the Text REtrieval Conference and web search evaluation to all types of modern library information systems (LISs) including online public access catalogues, discovery systems, and digital libraries that provide web search features to gather information from heterogeneous sources.

The authors apply conventional procedures from IR evaluation to the LIS context considering the specific characteristics of modern library materials.

The authors introduce a framework consisting of five parts: search queries, search results, assessors, testing, and data analysis. The authors show how to deal with comparability problems resulting from diverse document types, e.g., electronic articles vs printed monographs and what issues need to be considered for retrieval tests in the library context.

The framework can be used as a guideline for conducting retrieval effectiveness studies in the library context.

Although a considerable amount of research has been done on IR evaluation, and standards for conducting retrieval effectiveness studies do exist, to the authors’ knowledge this is the first attempt to provide a systematic framework for evaluating the retrieval effectiveness of twenty-first-century LISs. The authors demonstrate which issues must be considered and what decisions must be made by researchers prior to a retrieval test.

Hartslag Limburg, a cardiovascular diseases (CVD) prevention programme, integrates a community strategy and a high‐risk strategy. The present paper presents the evaluation design for, and baseline data from, the community intervention. The conceptual framework of the community intervention and its evaluation study were based on programme planning and evaluation models. Within this framework, community organization principles and methods and health education theories and methods were applied. Pre‐test/post‐test control group designs were used to study changes at the individual and the organizational level. The baseline results confirm the need to carry out a comprehensive CVD prevention community project, and the appropriateness of the conceptual model that is used for the development of interventions.

The aims of this study are: to present a training evaluation based on the “four levels model”; to demonstrate the value of experimental designs in evaluation studies; and to take a first step in the development of an evidence‐based training program.

The Kirkpatrick four levels model was used to evaluate the effectiveness of management training. Hypotheses about the effects of internal/external locus of control and experiential learning styles were tested. Measures gathered at several points of time were compared to measures taken from a control group. “Level four” results were obtained by 360‐degree feedback appraisal.

Trainees' knowledge improved significantly. Trained managers also demonstrated more “good” management behaviors and they scored higher on long‐term results. Trained supervisors with an internal locus of control acquired more knowledge than trained supervisors with an external locus of control. However, internals did not differ significantly from externals on actual behavior measures. The hypothesized relationship between learning style and training effectiveness was not supported. The four levels method gives detailed insights in results. Attention should be paid to trainees' locus of control.

The paper outlines the value of the “four levels model” of training evaluations and contributes to the “theory‐based, evidence‐based” approach to the development of training programs.

This paper discusses how service design can be used to activate a transition of textile artisan communities towards a sustainable future.

Two participatory case studies were undertaken with textile artisans in the UK and South Africa. These led to the development of an original methodological framework for “crafting situated services” – services designed to be meaningful to the local communities within which they are embedded. An evaluation study assessed the originality of the framework, its relevance for tackling real-world problems, its extensibility and the rigour of the research process.

The framework brings together a variety of roles, methods and tools that designers can adopt in order to enter communities, make sense of sustainable futures, facilitate the co-design of situated services and activate legacies within communities. Building on emerging anthropological approaches, the framework makes a bridge between service management and service design for social innovation, advancing the field towards design for social entrepreneurship.

Arguing against the idea of the designer “parachuting” into communities to create services regardless of the local context, the concept of “situated services” is proposed in this paper, alongside a process for “crafting” meaningful social innovations. This requires the service designer to adopt a more situated and embedded approach to designing with communities in order to align with their needs and aspirations, interweave places, time, people and practices within the process, and co-design contextually better services.