This article reviews experiences in the United States over the past 15 years in developing standards to guide and assess the work of professional evaluators. It introduces the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation's "Program Evaluation Standards" and overviews the Committee's project to develop "Educational…

The value and limitations of conceptualizing evaluation as a decision-oriented research and appraisal activity is discussed. The decisional contexts of evaluation projects is examined in terms of a comparison between two models of organization decision making. Certain remedies for problems arising from attempts to enhance decisional relevance of…