This case study examined the functional role activities of developmental evaluators in a school and community partnership employing a collaborative program model to improve an urban underperforming public school. Program implementers' assessments of program developments and their experience with developmental evaluators were also examined. Data…

Collective impact (CI) initiatives provide a promising collaborative community-based approach for addressing health disparities, but they are challenging to evaluate. This paper provides a detailed strategy for addressing these challenges through a case study, with the goal of not only of evaluating the CI, but also putting organizations in a…

The 4-H youth development organization is a complex public--private partnership between the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the nation's Cooperative Extension system and National 4-H Council, a private, nonprofit partner. The current article is focused on a partnership approach to the…

Linking evaluation methods to the several phases of a program's life cycle can provide evaluation planners and funders with guidance about what types of evaluation are most appropriate over the trajectory of social and educational programs and other interventions. If methods are matched to the needs of program phases, evaluation can and should…

Developmental evaluation (DE), essentially conceptualized by Patton over the past 30 years, is a promising evaluative approach intended to support social innovation and the deployment of complex interventions. Its use is often justified by the complex nature of the interventions being evaluated and the need to produce useful results in real time.…

Major advances in the number, capabilities, and quality of state, national, and transnational databases have opened up new opportunities for evaluators. Both large-scale data sets collected for administrative purposes and those collected by other researchers can provide data for a variety of evaluation-related activities. These include (a)…

Targeting Outcomes of Programs (TOP) is a seven-step hierarchical programming model in which the program development and performance sides are mirror images of each other. It served as a framework to identify a simple method for targeting photographic events in nonformal education programs, indicating why, when, and how photographs would be useful…

Each year a great many evaluations are conducted of international development efforts around the world. These development evaluations study projects, programs, country-wide portfolios, policy reform efforts, and other topics of interest to funders, governments, program managers, and other involved stakeholders. Although some of these evaluations…

Program evaluation and planning is at the heart of efforts to integrate the domains of practice and research. Traditionally, research and practice have operated in independent spheres with practitioners focused on the implementation of programs that affect individual behavior and researchers focused on the development and testing of theory.…

Considerable research has been conducted on the use of the findings of program evaluation, but little, if any, attention has been paid to the soundness of the methods of this research. If the methods are not sound or not well described in the research, the strength of the conclusions of the research is unknown. The authors examine the empirical…

This excerpt from the opening plenary asks evaluators to consider two questions regarding learning and evaluation: (a) How do evaluators know if, how, when, and what people are learning during an evaluation? and (b) In what ways can evaluation be a learning experience? To answer the first question, evaluators can apply the commonplaces of…

The authors present an approach for educating future evaluators by connecting evaluation theory and practice, organizational development, and grant making through experiential learning. They position this discussion on the conceptual framework of a newly developed graduate-level evaluation course, Advanced Program Development and Evaluation, which…

Describes the development of the International Development Evaluation Association (IDEAS) and the context in which it will operate. This new wing of the international evaluation architecture has been designed to support development evaluators in tackling professional changes of the new century. (SLD)