Chapter 3: Assessing Leadership Effects on Student Learning: Selected Challenges for Research and Program Evaluation

Adopting the perspectives of leadership researchers and program evaluators, this chapter identifies a small set of conceptual and methodological issues or challenges associated with assessing program and leader effects on students and offers some guidelines for addressing those challenges. The selection of issues was based on their centrality to robust claims about program and leader effects, along with some of our own recent experiences in attempting to address them. These issues include: conceptualizing the linkages between leadership behaviors and student outcomes; conceptualizing the linkages between leadership programs and leadership behaviors; defining and measuring student learning; defining and measuring leadership; and designing studies that will detect small effects.