Over the past 14 years, AEA's Oral History Project Team (Robin Lin Miller, Jean A. King, Valerie Caracelli, and Melvin M. Mark) has conducted interviews with individuals who have made signal contributions to evaluation theory and practice, tracing their professional development and contextualizing their work within the social and political…

In this article we describe the Graduate Review and Improvement Process (GRIP), an innovative evaluation process that makes student input central, now beginning its fifth year of implementation at the University of Minnesota. We begin by contrasting GRIP with traditional graduate program review, and we then explain the conceptual underpinnings of…

From the 1980s to the present, educational accountability in the United States has grown dramatically. Such accountability in U.S. school districts, although driven primarily by external demands, has internal manifestations as well. The chapter traces the historical development of internal evaluation in American school districts, then highlights…

This chapter begins with a commentary by King, a longtime admirer of Cousins and Whitmore, in which she discusses why their 1998 article on participatory evaluation is considered an important contribution to the field. Participatory evaluation was not a new idea in 1998. By the mid-1990s articles, chapters, and books that described evaluations…

This article discusses how to make process use an independent variable in evaluation practice: the purposeful means of building an organization's capacity to conduct and use evaluations in the long run. The goal of evaluation capacity building (ECB) is to strengthen and sustain effective program evaluation practices through a number of activities:…

Discusses why evaluation has a field has not studied its own theory systematically and examines the tensions between the often-cited claim of K. Lewin that there is noting as practical as a good theory and the response of M. Fullan that there is nothing as theoretical as good practice. (Author/SLD)

The editors give each of the theorists a chance to respond to questions posed about the context of the situation in relation to their own experience in the field, exploring how the exercise had an impact on their evaluation designs.

This article presents the lessons that a team of evaluators learned during a study of a multicultural initiative in a large, Midwestern school district. During the evaluation process, three incidents brought the evaluators' multicultural best intentions into sharp focus. This article describes the evaluation's framework and process and then…

The author describes potential evaluation capacity-building activities in contrast to the specifics of an evaluation design. Her response to the case of the Bunche-Da Vinci Learning Partnership Academy is developed in three parts: (1) an initial framing of the Bunche-Da Vinci situation; (2) what should be done before signing a contract; and (3)…