In the last three decades, the promotion of stakeholder involvement in evaluation has been gaining relevance in the Latin American and internationally, across varied agencies, institutions, and civic organizations. The 2030 Agenda and the Global Evaluation Agenda have also recognized the centrality of participation in evaluation. This article…

Evaluation policy has been identified as an important means of shaping and influencing organizational evaluation practice, yet, to date, little empirical research has been conducted to deepen our understanding of this relationship. The purpose of this study was to illuminate evaluation policy's role in leveraging organizational capacity to do and…

Evaluation has not been used to its fullest potential in environmental education (EE). Pressures from external stakeholders can cause organizations to focus on reporting requirements at the expense of conducting evaluations that support programmatic improvement. Understanding practitioners' satisfaction with their evaluation processes and the…

Culturally responsive approaches to evaluation are emerging across diverse program and community contexts to address increasingly intractable social, economic, political, and environmental concerns. Despite the sense of urgency, responsibility, and moral obligation motivating the use of these approaches, however, empirical research on the…

The notions of indigenous knowledge and cultural philosophies are becoming ubiquitous in many social inquiries, and evaluation is no exception. Nonetheless, the pursuit to embed relevant indigenous philosophies in contemporary evaluation has yet to succeed. In this article, we discuss indigenous relational philosophies, approaches, and practices…

Course satisfaction surveys play a relevant role in Higher Education, aiding in the quality assessment of courses and informing academic promotions. Nonetheless, understanding potential biases and influential factors within these surveys is crucial to their equitable utilization within universities. This study delves into a deconstruction of…

Despite marked growth in evaluation use and capacity in the U.S. Federal Government over the last 50 years, the levers that have driven institutional change have not previously been identified. This ethnographic study mapped the process and factors that have led to the diffusion of value in evaluation in the U.S. Federal Government. Analyses of…

In an era of ever-deepening budget cuts and a concomitant demand for substantiated programs, many organizations have elected to conduct internal program evaluations. Internal evaluations offer advantages (e.g., enhanced evaluator program knowledge and ease of data collection) but may confront important challenges, including credibility threats,…

Evaluation capacity building (ECB) is an essential element for generating credible and actionable evidence on Extension programs. This paper offers a discussion of ECB efforts in Cooperative Extension and how such efforts enable Extension professionals to collect and use credible and actionable evidence on the quality and impacts of programs.…

Increased demand for accountability has forced Extension educators to evaluate their programs and document program impacts. Due to this situation, some Extension educators may view evaluation simply as the task, imposed on them by administrators, of collecting outcome and impact data for accountability. They do not perceive evaluation as a useful…

Program evaluation can play a critical role in supporting high quality implementation of social programs to help them achieve their goal of social impact. Evaluation scholars have developed a wide range of strategies to help build programs' internal evaluation capacity in an effort to support meaningful use of evaluation. However, the evaluation…

In 2014 the institutionalization of European higher education and training, as well as research and innovation, policy entered a new phase: a number of financial instruments were simplified and merged. The Erasmus Mundus programme, wherein consortia of European and overseas universities built joint master's or doctoral degrees, was split into two…

Program evaluation often suffers due to time constraints, imperfect instruments, incomplete data, and the need to report standardized metrics. This article about the evaluation process for the Wi$eUp financial education program showcases the difficulties inherent in evaluation and suggests best practices for assessing program effectiveness. We…

We conducted a youth participatory evaluation of a bullying prevention curriculum before the curriculum was implemented in communities. We partnered with youths from a young women leaders' program to reduce the number of lessons in an existing curriculum and determine which activities were likely to have the greatest impact. To evaluate the…

We review the value of cost-effectiveness analysis for evaluation and decision making with respect to educational programs and discuss its application to early reading interventions. We describe the conditions for a rigorous cost-effectiveness analysis and illustrate the challenges of applying the method in practice, providing examples of programs…