While evaluators have explored the implementation of culturally responsive evaluation (CRE), the failures of applying CRE are less often told. In this article, we use a reflective case narrative to explore our successes and failures in implementing our CRE approach, including an educative stance. We draw on a formative evaluation of a…

Service-learning courses provide students with practical opportunities to enhance their learning and development in the field, along with getting students engaged in different communities and settings. However, there are still many challenges to designing and offering effective service-learning courses, such as requiring all students to…

Blending high-quality and rigorous research with pure evaluation practice can often be best accomplished through thoughtful collaboration. The evaluation of a high school drug prevention program (All Stars Senior) is an example of how perceived competing purposes and methodologies can coexist to investigate formative and summative outcome…

Social network analysis (SNA) is a methodological approach to measuring and mapping relationships. It can be used to study whole networks, all of the ties within a defined group, or connections that individuals have in their personal communities. The resulting graph-based structures illustrate the composition and effectiveness of networks on a…

The clash between Western and Indigenous ways of knowing has been epitomized by the "parachuting model" of the Western researcher who drops onto the reservation, collects data, and leaves, never to be heard from again. The strengths of indigenous science, for example, observation and contextual factors, are either ignored or…

Using a cross-case analysis of three distinct participatory program evaluations, this paper contributes to current discourse on how evaluators create opportunities for learning. Although each team of evaluators intended to promote planned process use, post-evaluation discussions amongst them identified evidence where use emerged throughout the…

The authors tell about their heterogeneous 91 person research and evaluation unit at an operating foundation in St. Paul, Minnesota. They focus on evaluation for program improvement, one of several purposes of studies they work on. The three authors write from their different manager positions within the unit. Included are the context of the…

This article discusses the significant contributions of Peter H. Rossi to the field of program evaluation. It was the publication of "Evaluation: A Systematic Approach" by Peter Rossi, Howard Freeman, and Sonia Rosenbaum in 1979 that most emphatically marked the point at which program evaluation had clearly consolidated as a distinct field of…

Although the need for evaluation of prevention programs is clear, the implementation of evaluation, particularly for large, complex projects with multiple investigators, poses numerous challenges. Program evaluators in these circumstances do not have the same degree of control as, say, experimental psychologists and must find ways to obtain data…

Part of a forum on a Federal offices' search for a strategy to gain better evaluation utilization, this paper discusses the strategy's conception. Three categories of educational evaluations, defined by social and structural characteristics of the program environment, are identified: (1) trial evaluations, whose funding is not guaranteed beyond…

The viewpoints of contributors to the forum are reviewed. Many of the disagreements represent fundamental differences in what constitutes evaluation. All four authors agree that the formative/summative distinction is useful and will continue to be an important concept in program evaluation, although the distinction needs greater clarification.…

This paper examines the concepts of program monitoring and program evaluation in the literature, and offers working definitions based on two dimensions of measurement: focus (what questions are addressed) and timing (how often the measures are taken). Focus can be on inputs to the program or outcomes from it; timing can be one-shot or continuous.…

The "CSE Program Evaluation Kit" is a series of nine books intended to assist people conducting program evaluations. This volume, the first in the kit, provides an overview of evaluation activities and a directory to the rest of the kit. Chapter 1 explicates the evaluation perspective that grounds the kit and describes the role of evaluation in…

Major drawback of traditional evaluation is its emphasis on outcome" or terminal performance; what is needed are more process-oriented methods of assessment. Author describes Program Analysis" as a possible model. (Author/MB)

Designed to guide project evaluators in determining the type of evaluation appropriate to projects; explains formative and summative evaluations, gives examples of each, and explains the evaluator's role in each method. (Journal availability: National Dissemination and Assessment Center, California State University, 5151 State University Drive,…