Program Evaluation and Performance Measurement: An Introduction to Practice 3rd Edition

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.

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.

Just like a new book!

Required for school

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.

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

This is a required text for a graduate course in Criminal Justice. I am about halfway through the term and at this point I believe I can give a fair review. First, this is a difficult topic to understand and perform in. This text vastly complicates that difficulty. The authors are Bing Canadian. They use examples from Canada, the UK, and the US. Being written by non-native US Americans, their language usage is alien. The term "gaming" is an example. This is a British term used for "rigging the outcome". The authors did not define the term until much later in the text. If one were to put it into a search engine, the results returned relate to video games.The language is not the only difficulty with this book. The authors seem to have a "paid by the page", or perhaps by the word attitude. It is very wordy, redundant, and has no regard for simplicity. I went to the internet for my information. Even Wikipedia was more informative. I did find what I needed in other texts, papers, and references. The internet and a good professor saved me.The Kindle edition has charts and tables that are too small to see and cannot be enlarged.I hope that your professor selects a better text for your class!

Bought for my university class, at a way cheaper price than the university bookstore

One of the best textbooks I’ve ever used. Will refer to it over and over again. This book was for a graduate class.

I just started reading it and so far it seems very simple, informative, and easy to follow. This will be a very useful for me as prep for future studies.