This article shares lessons from the field with program evaluations in the English-Speaking Commonwealth Caribbean (ESCC) region. The research highlighted that the challenges faced by evaluators working in the ESCC are quite similar to those experienced by evaluators elsewhere. However, the findings note the impact of the region's colonial past…

Practitioners are being placed under increasing pressure to evaluate the success of their outreach activities, both by government and by their own universities. Based in a reductionist doctrine of "evidence-based practice", there is a desire to demonstrate the effectiveness and value-for-money across activities that now account for…

Since the early 1990s, lifelong learning has become a major policy concern for the European Union, being seen as a means for enabling individuals to be more competitive in social and economic contexts that are continually changing. After a series of white papers and strategies in the field of lifelong learning, the EU launched the Lifelong…

Notwithstanding significant efforts by international aid agencies, aid ineffectiveness became apparent in 1990s as the impact of continued development intervention did not endure the expected outcomes. Conventional monitoring and evaluation by those agencies is critiqued for focusing on measuring project outcomes and giving little attention to…

In attempting to use a realistic evaluation approach to explore the role of Community Parents in early parenting programs in Toronto, a novel technique was developed to analyze the links between contexts (C), mechanisms (M) and outcomes (O) directly from experienced practitioner interviews. Rather than coding the interviews into themes in terms of…

This paper presents the author's comment on "Evaluation Field Building in South Asia: Reflections, Anecdotes, and Questions" by Katherine Hay. Hay raises a number of extremely relevant issues relating to evaluation field building in South Asia. In this paper, the author aims to underscore the importance of three priorities for initiating…

This paper contains results of an empirical study that tested the efficacy and acceptability of two templates designed to fully involve students in proper and fair peer-assessments of their group project work (GPW) by providing concrete evidence of independent progressive documentation of their peers' contributions to the work-process and…

The papers in this dialogue help develop evaluation as a field (both in South Asia and other regions). What comes through in all of the papers is both humility of where evaluation is as a field and imagination and ambition of where evaluators could be in the near future. Reading the papers in this forum makes them enthusiastic about being…

Current economic conditions and the increasing competition for government funding are leading to an increased focus on the impact of research. Measuring the impact of research is difficult because not all impacts are direct and some can be negative or result from the identification of problems that require a non-research response. The time between…

School improvement is much sought and often claimed. However, it is questionable whether overall achievement in countries such as the USA or England has improved by any significant amount over thirty years. Several school improvement programmes have been claimed as successful, but evaluations, even where they exist, are generally poor: based on…

Although the Delphi is widely used, research on certain methodological issues is somewhat limited. After a brief introduction to the strengths, limitations, and methodological challenges of the technique, we share our experiences (as well as problems encountered) with an electronic Delphi of educational program evaluation (EPE) in the Asia-Pacific…

This paper is a reflection on practice. It begins by briefly describing an evaluation of an externally-funded education programme in Kosovo (a new country in south-east Europe). The programme was managed by Save the Children in Kosovo and aimed to develop and promote models of inclusive education through three strands of activity. The first of…

Rapidly declining response rates and the associated threat of nonresponse bias call into question the validity of data obtained through telephone surveys, a tool often used in evaluation. This article explores changes in nonresponse bias over time by examining three data points (1991, 1996, and 2002) from an annual household telephone survey…

Career development practitioners understand that the value of career and employment services extends beyond attachment to the labor market. However, "soft" outcomes such as increased self-efficacy and improved ability to manage transitions are difficult to measure. Convincing funders and policy makers of the significance of such outcomes…

This paper describes three multigrade school reforms in Latin America: (1) Colombia's "Escuela Nueva", (2) Guatemala's "Nueva Escuela Unitaria", and (3) Chile's MECE-Rural. Each reform endowed primary teachers and students with special training and instructional materials, and encouraged new kinds of instruction in rural…