Summary
Contents
Subject index
The past decade has seen increased attention to cost-effectiveness and benefit-cost analysis in education as administrators are being asked to accomplish more with the same or even fewer resources, philanthropists are keen to calculate their “return on investment” in social programs, and the general public is increasingly scrutinizing how resources are allocated to schools and colleges. This text (titled Cost-Effectiveness Analysis in its previous editions) is the only full-length book to provide readers with the step-by-step methods they need to plan and implement a benefit-cost analysis in education. The authors examine a range of issues, including how to identify, measure, and distribute costs; how to measure effectiveness, utility, and benefits; and how to incorporate cost evaluations into the decision-making process. The updates to the Third Edition reflect the considerable methodological development in the evaluation literature, and the greater empiricism practiced by education researchers, to help readers learn to apply more advanced methods to their own analyses.
The Ingredients Method
The Ingredients Method
Objectives
- Present the ingredients method for measuring costs.
- Identify ingredients in educational interventions.
- Specify ingredients by category.
- Describe data sources and needs for various types of ingredients.
- Provide examples of ingredients and descriptive data.
The ingredients method is a straightforward approach to estimating costs of educational interventions. The method is designed to assist in economic evaluations by providing policy-relevant information on resource use, which may then be linked to effectiveness or economic benefits. The method is founded on the economic principle of opportunity costs and cost accounting (Levin 1975, 2001). As described in Chapter 3, the idea of opportunity cost is that every resource utilized in implementing an intervention has a value or cost. If the ingredients are identified and costs ascertained based on their opportunity cost, ...
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