Accountability, Program Quality, Outcome Assessment, and Graduate Education for Public Affairs and Administration

The answer to this has come increasingly to mean outcome assessment. Outcome assessment has many forms and meanings, but typically it involves specifying the goals and objectives of a program and ways in which the attainment of those goals can be measured. As an extension of program evaluation, it should be familiar to public administrators because of the extent to which program evaluations dominated debate over public programs in the 1960s and 1970s.