Program Evaluation and Performance Measurement: An Introduction to Practice

Needed to get caught up on things in hurry to support a client project and this book provided me all the information I needed. Super read

Book's like new. Arrived promptly.

Just like a new book!

The book is composed of 12 chapters, each of which contains a summary followed by discussion questions and an appendice or appendix. This textbook is aimed at students as well as practitioners in Public Administration programs but this book would be useful for those who run programs at a wide variety of public and nonprofit institutions. At a time when many agencies have to deal with budgetary restrictions, understanding how to document, evaluate, assess and present data to the powers that be are crucial to a program's survival. Thus this book will be of much use to those seeking to broaden their knowledge of the subject, though for a layman the subject often comes across as abstract and dense.To illustrate such abstract concepts such as "Program logic models" that touch upon research design and measurements, the authors focused their book on one program in particular: BWC (Body Worn Cameras) by police in response to community outcries over police brutality. This is a highly controversial topic and the authors use this example as a way to discuss what's involved in evaluating the effectiveness of a program. The other example used is a neighborhood watch program. I'm not clear why all the notable examples used fall into the criminal justice category. Despite these interesting topics, the discussion of each program is so dry that unless you have experience in collecting data, you will likely find the discussions dry and uninspiring.Lastly, there are no illustrations other than graphs and tables. It feels like a statistics book. If that's your cup of tea, enjoy! You'll find a lot here. But I just found it tough to slog through, and I think many students will, too.

Do not buy this book from this company. I purchased it the first time and discovered a printing issue - missing pages 455-487 (conveniently part of my first assigned course reading). I thought it was a fluke and ordered a second copy and the same thing happened. There is a major printing issue with this publisher. The book is incomplete.

Required for school

It skips 30 pages in the middle. Half of chapter 11 and 12 are missing!! Several of my classmates gave the same issue

I do not like it. Most college textbooks have page breaks and highlight key terms and definitions. This is just so much jargon and run-on paragraphs. Key terms that should be there are not even indexed, so you cannot just find what you need. It is difficult to read, and I skim pages because just reading one paragraph wastes time when it suddenly switches topics with no break between subjects and not very good explanations. A lot is written as if we should be experts and know everything already. It's a horrible setup and makes it confusing and pointless to try and study with— just walls of text with no break, and visually, it is difficult to focus.