The world has experienced rapid changes, leading to pressing issues such as environmental degradation, social inequality, and resource depletion. As a transdisciplinary field, evaluation has emerged as a crucial tool in addressing these challenges and promoting systemic change. However, concerns have been raised regarding the field's capacity to…

Collaborative Evaluation systematically invites and engages stakeholders in program evaluation planning and implementation. Unlike "distanced" evaluation approaches, which reject stakeholder participation as evaluation team members, Collaborative Evaluation assumes that active, on-going engagement between evaluators and program staff,…

This dissertation research describes an investigation that explores the nature of the relationship between participation in evaluation and the use of evaluation findings and processes within three large-scale multisite evaluations. The purpose of this study is to test whether assumptions and theories about participation translate into evaluation…

Background: Cultural competency is an important but under-adopted skill among professional evaluators. Yet in the transactions around job seeking and hiring in evaluation, cultural competency is a practical and common concept. How cultural competency gets communicated in those transactions may provide insights for the field. Purpose: The purpose…

Potential sources of bias are classified as ethical compromises, value inertias, or cognitive limitations. Thirteen specifics of intuitive thinking and judgmental processes are described. The author wishes to alert naturalistic evaluators to common failings. This list can be a useful checklist in reducing, integrating and drawing inferences from…

Evaluators, by the nature of their work, must be concerned with data management activities ranging from the collection and recording of data to the analyses, summation, and presentation of those data. Though word processing has been cited as the most frequently used microcomputer package by educational evaluators, spreadsheets are among the most…

Focuses on ethical issues that can arise in the collection and analysis of data in evaluations. Addresses four issues: (1) the application of cost-benefit thinking to judgments about research ethics, (2) the quality of research design, (3) the need to explore the data, and (4) the censoring of data. (Author/SLD)

Four evaluation methods for determining educational policy are objectivism; subjectivism; emotive-imperative; and instrumentalism. For the objectivist, the rationale for undertaking an evaluation is based on empirical verification or non-verification of claims of existing policies or activities. Secondly, the objectivist is interested in…