Is assessment a top-down bureaucratic mandate, an undertaking that seems to have little to do with improving practice, an inauthentic activity that frustrates and disempowers, an afterthought? Or is it a process embraced and enacted together by all stakeholders as a means to learn and grow and enact change in the world? The authors of the…

Educating for American Democracy (EAD) partnered with ETS on a symposium held in July 2021 to take stock of what is known and to provide guidance for future research, policy, and practice in measurement of civic learning opportunities and outcomes. This research note is meant to further the work accomplished at the seminar. First, this note…

Chemistry plays a critical role in daily life, impacting areas such as medicine and health, consumer products, energy production, the ecosystem, and many other areas. Communicating about chemistry in informal environments has the potential to raise public interest and understanding of chemistry around the world. However, the chemistry community…

The emergence of and the attention given to culture in the evaluation field over the last decade has created a heightened awareness of and need for evaluators to understand the complexity and multidimensionality of evaluations within multicultural, multiracial, and cross-cultural contexts. In this article, the authors discuss how cultural…

Evaluation in environmental education is fairly nascent despite decades-long attention to its importance. In setting the context for future chapters appearing in this special issue of the "Journal of Evaluation and Program Planning," attention is devoted to the political circumstances associated with retrenchment in the public sector and increased…

Critiques the chapters in this theme issue and concludes that the challenges to the pragmatic use of deliberative democratic evaluation are great. Current practice and theory do not go far enough to unmask the potential of evaluation for supporting democratic practices and creating democratic communities. (Author/SLD)

This article describes a simulation that fulfills many of the goals of a scholar/apprentice model--one that requires a sustained period of time during which an apprentice practices a set of discipline-specific skills under the guidance of his or her mentor. Such an extended simulation differs from shorter exercises in several ways, such as the…

Identifies five themes that illustrate different aspects of the process of diffusing democratic deliberation into more widespread use: (1) appreciation; (2) addition; (3) apprehension; (4) application; and (5) adaptation. These themes give guidance concerning evaluation practice and the role of evaluation in society. (Author/SLD)

This essay responds to Jane Danielewicz's and Peter Elbow's recent piece on contract grading in "College Composition and Communication" (December 2009). I discuss the similarities of their approach to my own contract process, finding that we share a quantitative/performative method for grading. I also explore our differences. While they guarantee…

Describes a partnership of youth and adults in Ontario, Canada in the generative process of participatory evaluation as youth and adults jointly produced a conference as a participatory evaluation and worked as democratic equals toward a common goal. (SLD)

Highlights the important contributions of responsive evaluation's orientation to local issues and qualitative methods, but rejects responsive evaluation's relativity in favor of deliberation as a vehicle for adjudicating among competing evaluative claims. The great strength of responsive evaluation is that it helped break the intellectual…

Presents a framework for judging evaluations on the basis of their potential for democratic deliberation that includes the interrelated requirements of inclusion, dialogue, and deliberation. Operationalizes these requirements in 10 questions to guide evaluation and meta-evaluation from a democratic viewpoint. (SLD)

Analyzes the complexities surrounding the concept of dialogue in evaluation through a critical examination of current theory and practices. Uses a descriptive typology based on genre, process, goal, evaluator identity, orientation, and epistemology to analyze two vignettes of dialogue in evaluation. (Author/SLD)

Challenges the assumption that evaluation should aim for fostering deliberative democracy. A modest effort by an evaluator to contribute to deliberative democracy is defensible, but vigorous political advocacy violates social expectation. (Author/SLD)

Describes a comprehensive evaluative framework that draws on a larger range of goals that have been posed for education in a democratic and free society. Tradeoffs are made among criteria that include: (1) freedom of choice; (2) productive efficiency; (3) equity; and (4) social cohesion. (SLD)