June 1994 — Features

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CARAS: A School-Based, Case Management System for At-Risk Students

The best way to overcome this is to help them see how personally productive program evaluation can be, particularly when done with a computer-based system. We remind them that CARAS provides highly detailed sets of case management information. CARAS allows case managers and their teams to conduct a thorough and meaningful evaluation of activities. For example, the different causes of service success or failure can be compared across sites, thus indicating whether such incidents are site-specific or are consistent across sites, cases or circumstances. Indices such as these are most useful in explaining certain trends and making programmatic decisions. Additionally, useful collected data concerns family demographics, providing a wealth of background on the site cases. With this data, program strengths and weaknesses can be identified, allowing users to pinpoint items such as critical family contact points, or the points along the student pipeline at which students most often experience difficulties and begin "dropping out." CARAS also greatly enhances a formative evaluation design, leading to overall program improvement. Given the importance of documenting program development at each site, CARAS is ideally suited for building records of local implementation and adjustment while enabling on-going analysis. In turn, this allows adjustments and/or corrections to be made in the application of the case management model. Ongoing information processing makes it easier to interpret formative data. This capability is especially helpful if case management services are being implemented as intended, yet the desired effects are not occurring.
The formative process is two-fold. First, as the overall project evolves and each site shapes its adaptation of the case management model, it is important for local case management teams to meet routinely to assess whether their activities are yielding success.