Alternative high schools serve some of the most vulnerable students and their programs present a significant challenge to evaluate. Determining the impact of an alternative high school that serves mostly at-risk students presented a significant research problem. Few studies exist that dig deeper into the characteristics and strategies of successful alternative schooling. Moreover valid program evaluation methods to identify successful alternative school practices are hit and miss. As a result, public policy and systems of accountability have either disregarded information relating to alternative high schools or unjustifiably included them in comparisons with traditional high schools. This dissertation studied the issue of how best to evaluate alternative high schools and what tools support leaders in planning a thorough and accurate program evaluation. The Alternative High School Program Evaluation Toolkit was developed to support school leaders and evaluation teams made up of internal and external stakeholders as they facilitate the program evaluation process. The features of the Toolkit address the need for alternative school evaluation to be practical, useful, fair and accurate. The Evaluation Toolkit includes training materials, protocols, an evaluation planning worksheet and an evaluation planning matrix that supports the team in conducting the evaluation. The research represented in this dissertation is theoretically and practically grounded in Bridges and Hallinger's (1995) Problem-Based Learning (PBL) and Borg and Gall's (1989) Research and Development (R&D) Cycle. The product of the R&D Cycle was the Alternative High School Program Evaluation Toolkit and a process for use by evaluation teams assigned the task of planning and carrying out program evaluations.

The Framework for K-12 Science Education, the foundation for the Next Generation Science Standards, identifies scientific explanation as one of the eight practices "essential for learning science." In order to design professional development to help teachers implement these new standards, we need to assess students' current skill level in explanation construction, characterize current teacher practice surrounding it, and identify best practices for supporting students in explanation construction. This multiple-case study investigated teacher practice in eight high school science inquiry units in the Portland metro area and the scientific explanations the students produced in their work samples. Teacher Instructional Portfolios (TIPs) were analyzed with a TIP rubric based on best practices in teaching science inquiry and a qualitative coding scheme. Written scientific explanations were analyzed with an explanation rubric and qualitative codes. Relationships between instructional practices and explanation quality were examined. The study found that students struggle to produce high quality explanations. They have the most difficulty including adequate reasoning with science content. Also, teachers need to be familiar with the components of explanation and use a variety of pedagogical techniques to support students' explanation construction. Finally, the topic of the science inquiry activity should be strongly connected to the content in the unit, and students need a firm grasp of the scientific theory or model on which their research questions are based to adequately explain their inquiry results.