Evaluating Practice: Guidelines for the Accountable Professional (5th Edition) [Hardcover]

Martin Bloom (Author), Joel Fischer (Author), John G. Orme (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0205466982 | ISBN-13: 978-0205466986 | Publication Date: July 25, 2005 | Edition: 5

Evaluating Practicecontinues to be the most comprehensive practice evaluation text available. Focusing on single-system designs, Evaluating Practice, Fifth Edition, presents clear guidelines on conceptualizing and measuring problems, developing practice-oriented evaluation designs, understanding and analyzing data, and ethical guidelines for practice evaluation. Specifically written for students and practitioners in all the human services, including social work, psychology, counseling, nursing and psychiatry. Unsurpassed among human service evaluation texts for bringing clarity to evaluation procedures, Evaluating Practice comes with a free CD-ROM featuring numerous programs, including the innovative SINGWIN program for analyzing data (created by Charles Auerbach, David Schnall, and Heidi Heft Laporte of Yeshiva University), and the CASS and CAAP programs (created by Walter Hudson) for managing cases and scoring scales. The improved and expanded CD-ROM contains an "Intervention Plan" form that can be used to develop a comprehensive intervention and evaluation plan of action that parallels chapters in the text. The CD-ROM also contains a new "running case" that can be used interactively to try out concepts and procedures from the text. Significant updates to SINGWIN (on CD-Rom), including the incorporation of new statistical procedures designed for ease of application. And the prologue offers an extensive case illustrating the integration of practice, ethics, and evaluation for students, making the text even more appealing to practitioners.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Evaluating Practice continues to be the most comprehensive practice evaluation text available. Focusing on single-system designs, Evaluating Practice, 5/e, presents clear guidelines on conceptualizing and measuring problems, using practice-oriented evaluation designs, and understanding and analyzing resulting client data. Ethical guidelines for practice evaluation are infused throughout. Evaluating Practice was written for students and practitioners in all of the human services, including social work, psychology, counseling, nursing, and psychiatry.

Evaluating Practice comes with a free CD-ROM featuring numerous programs, including the unique and innovative SINGWIN program for analyzing single-system design data (created by Charles Auerbach, David Schnall, and Heidi Heft Laporte of Yeshiva University); the CASS and CAAP programs for managing cases and scoring scales (created by Walter Hudson); and a NEW set of Microsoft Excel Workbooks and interactive exercises.

Highlights of the Fifth Edition

• Improved and expanded CD-ROM contains the following items: Microsoft Excel Workbooks that illustrate how to graph and analyze single-system design data, score standardized scales, and understand contextualized, response-guided, single-system design practice; an “Intervention Plan” form that can be used to develop a comprehensive intervention and evaluation plan of action that parallels chapters in the text; and Microsoft PowerPoint presentations that correspond to material covered in this new edition.
• CD-ROM also contains SIGNIFICANT updates to SINGWIN including the incorporation of the latest statistical procedures designed for analyzing single-system design data.

Text Website: http://www.ablongman.com/bloom
This website offers a variety of resources for students and instructors, including web links, technical assistance for the SINGWIN software package, sample syllabi, and lecture presentations.

What reviewers are saying. . .

“The three strengths of this text are its comprehensiveness and depth, lucid writing and practice relevance. It’s so good that I cannot even suggest any broad improvements. I love this book.”
Allen Rubin, University of Texas at Austin

“This is the most accurate, comprehensive text available on single subject evaluation and it is also highly readable and engaging.”
Wanda Spaid, Brigham Young University

Product Details

• Hardcover: 744 pages
• Publisher: Allyn & Bacon; 5 edition (July 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0205466982
• ISBN-13: 978-0205466986
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #608,567 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars enough is enough, March 21, 2005

By 

a reader... (new york city) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Evaluating Practice: Guidelines for the Accountable Professional (with FREE SINGWIN CD-ROM) (4th Edition) (Hardcover)

I was pleased to hear that this text had been assigned in a graduate research course at my graduate school of social work. I'm seriously disappointed. I would not recommend this text's continued use. It is excessively repetitive, constantly restating previous material (commonly referred to as 'rehashing'), and, as a sidebar, i can't help but mention an irritating habit of unnecessary references to material yet to come ('we'll talk about that more in chapter 14.'). The writing style is terribly wordy, and in a weighted, clunky pseudo-conversational style that rarely is effective in a textbook. The actual technical information is obscured in a constant river of verbiage, usually in page after page of solid block text, the least helpful format when learning technical information (or when subsequently searching for specific information or techniques). The result? It serves as a strong sedative. Finally, the authors repeatedly express apologies, in what eventually (by page 350) feels like an obsequious and cloying manner, for putting forward an empirical and accountable approach to clinical practice. The worst, though, is the repetition of material, as if the reader were an idiot. The sheer relentlessness of it is what is so galling, and at $100 bucks, neither affordable nor worth the investment. There are other texts out there with clearer, cleaner, more articulate prose, that are more respectful of the reader, and at half the price, such as the classic and affordable: Single-Case Research Designs: Methods for Clinical and Applied Settings by Alan E. Kazdin. Ignore the pollyanna reviews above and below, and avoid this text, or if on the syllabus, protest and suggest an alternative.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Classic in Practice Evaluation, November 13, 2003

By 

Jaime Alvelo-Burgos (San Juan, PR United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Evaluating Practice: Guidelines for the Accountable Professional (with FREE SINGWIN CD-ROM) (4th Edition) (Hardcover)

Bloom, Fischer and Orme continue to make an unique contribution to improving practice in the human services by providing a road map by which practitioners can evaluate their effectiveness. I've been using their text book for over 15 years in teaching practice evaluation and in has been an invaluable help. The new edition has a CD Rom with SingWin, CAAP,and CAAS which I was able to install in Windows XP Home edition. You must install CAAS before CAAP for it to work. The sofware computerizes record keeping, score computation, and graph construction. I strongly reccommend this textbook for human services faculty.

5.0 out of 5 stars great shape, September 23, 2011

By 

MelMel - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Evaluating Practice: Guidelines for the Accountable Professional (6th Edition) (Hardcover)

Book was in wonderful condition. I received the book in the expected amount of time. I would use this source again.