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With increasing frequency the U. S. Congress is including mandates for evaluation in legislation that creates or reauthorizes social programs. Recent examinations of the federal role in evaluation have claimed that congressional calls for evaluation are overly vague and that improved evaluation would result from greater specification of informa tion needs by Congress. This article considers the advantages and disadvantages of increasing the specificity of legislation calling for evaluation by reviewing the congres sional mandates for several national-level evaluations and examining in-depth the design of one congressionally mandated evaluation that included very specific design parameters in the authorizing legislation. The conclusion is that congressional input in the areas of evaluation questions, audiences, and timeliness is warranted and important, while explic itness in areas of research design is unnecessarily restrictive and can diminish the quality of evaluations. Congressional review of evaluation plans prepared by federal agencies and their contractors is recommended in cases where Congress is concerned about meth odology.

This article focuses on the management of federally funded evaluation research by (1) discussing several aspects of building an efficient in-house evaluation team including planning for upcoming procurements, deciding which staff to bid on a proposal, maintaining in-house staff versus hiring new staff, subcontracting, and using consul tants; (2) defining and discussing four possible contractor/client relationships; and (3) considering the contractor/practitioner team and problems of building rapport and working relationships with field practitioners.

The Education Voucher Demonstration began in the Alum Rock Union Elementary School District during the 1972-1973 school year. Under the voucher concept, parents freely select a school for their child and receive a credit or voucher equal to the cost of the child's education that is paid directly to the school upon enrollment. It was presumed that this form of school finance would foster competition among the schools and improve the quality of education by making schools more responsive to students' needs. An initial external evaluation at the conclusion of the first year found, however, a relative loss in reading achievement for students in the six public schools that participated in the voucher demonstration. The present report reexamines some of these data using a quasi-experi mental design involving multiple pretests and individual students' test scores (rather than school means) as the unit of analysis. The results appear to indicate that the deleterious reading effect of the voucher demonstration was confined to a few within-school programs featuring nontraditional, innovative curricula.

The possible biasing effects of attrition of subjects in experiments is a problem to which social science researchers and evaluators rarely attend. A study of the relationships between attrition rate and background variables for children participating in the Nation al Follow Through Evaluation revealed that in general there were few differences between students who dropped out of treatment and comparison groups.