Center for Evaluation and Assessment

The Center for Evaluation and Assessment (CEA), housed in the College of Education at the University of Iowa conducts a wide variety of program evaluation in collaboration with faculty across The University of Iowa campus and with school systems, colleges, and universities throughout Iowa and the United States.

The Center for Evaluation and Assessment provides evaluation and assessment services to clients toward informing projects and decision-making processes, while using wide variety of methodologies in order to be sensitive and responsive to the needs of the project stakeholders.  Evaluators provides formative and summative evaluation work, and often both as complimentary forms of evaluation.  Another purpose of the CEA is to advance evaluation work and evaluation methodologies, including measurement and assessment of applied educational initiatives.

The CEA is a Board of Regents approved center in existence under charter since 1992.  Since then, over 50 evaluations of educational and social programs have been successfully completed, including projects funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Health, the United States Department of Education, the Iowa Department of Education, and the United States Department of Health and Human Services, among many others. 

The CEA was founded by and is currently directed by Don Yarbrough.  Together with the CEA evaluation team, individual staff and teams of evaluators collaborate to write evaluation proposals, design and implement evaluation methodologies for particular projects, communicate with project staff and other stakeholders, and report evaluation results to various stakeholders and funding agencies.  The CEA staff also produces evaluation reports, peer-reviewed articles, books and book chapters, and other publications to disseminate sound evaluation and assessment practices. 

Some of the activities the CEA has done or may be involved in with future projects includes (but is not limited to):

• Design and validate a student history assessment that is sensitive to a project intervention and has some technical adequacy evidence.
• Implement a multi-year investigation of the state-wide changes (student assessment, test use by teachers and administrators, changes in curricula) that have occurred as a result of the No Child Left Behind legislation.
• Evaluate the collaboration of researchers from diverse fields in producing and disseminating new research and innovations.
• Proprietary evaluations for various organizations, including nationally known organizations in education
• Evaluation of diversity initiatives, including programs designed to increase the number of underrepresented graduate students in STEM-related fields
• Needs assessments prior to program implementation or as a formative measure during program implementation
• Detailed and comprehensive participant observations during intensive teacher professional development
• Merging, management, and analysis of large data sets including the Iowa BEDS database, the Iowa MIS, and the National Student Clearinghouse
• Metaevaluation, or evaluation accountability