Four different kinds of evaluation suppliers are examined: professionals, specialists, craftsmen, and amateurs. Three surveys undertaken by the European Commission on the framework of structural policies indicate that Europe is experiencing a shift from amateurs toward craftsmen toward specialists. Two tables show responses to evaluation criteria.…

Explores some opportunities open to evaluators as practitioners of organizational development and the advantages and competencies evaluators can bring to such initiatives. Presents eight examples of such opportunities. (SLD)

Compared scores assigned to college placement essays by a computer program with the evaluations of human readers for just under 1,300 essays. Results show high agreement between computer and human scores, and both human and machine readers tended to give higher scores for analytic and practical themes and lower scores for those involving emotions.…

This article documents the author's personal journey as a new evaluator traversing paradigms, continents, and timelines on a quest to discover how best to practice evaluation for the benefit of Maori people (indigenous to New Zealand). The journey has taken the author to a number of evaluation conferences in Australasia and North America, which…

This commentary reviews "Negotiating Researcher Roles in Ethnographic Program Evaluation" and discusses the changing field of evaluation. It situates postmodern deliberations in evaluation anthropology and ethnoevaluation, two concepts that explore the interdisciplinary merger in evaluation, ethnography, and anthropology. Reflecting on Hymes's…

As with all media, the Internet structures and frames information, rewarding some information search and decision behaviors while punishing others and, thereby, strongly influences evaluation research results and possibilities. Now that the Internet is for many evaluators the information medium of choice, the impacts of the medium on evaluation…

Practitioner involvement in evaluation, research, development, and other forms of disciplined inquiry that are small scale, local, grounded, and carried out by professionals who directly deliver those services is embraced across a wide range of professions as essential to good professional practice. However, little is known about the character,…

This article uses a program-level evaluation to assess the characteristics of smaller-scale project evaluations and their use for project improvement and accountability purposes. The authors used available information from the annual Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program evaluation surveys to describe the characteristics of evaluation…

This study examined the effects of training on peer assessment and comments provided regarding oral presentations in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classrooms. In Study 1, both the treatment and control groups received instruction on skill aspects, but only the treatment group was given an additional 40-minute training on how to rate…

With a national shortage of special education personnel, including assessment personnel (Caranikas-Walker; Shapley, Cordeau, 2006; Karr, 2005), rural communities face serious challenges in retaining and recruiting highly qualified special education staff due to limited access to university training programs (Hausman & Hausman, 2003; Knapczyk,…

Legislation passed during the 2001 Iowa legislative session established the Student Achievement and Teacher Quality Program, Iowa Code Section 284.12(1). This legislation requires the Iowa Department of Education (DE) to annually report the statewide progress on the following: student achievement scores in mathematics and reading at the fourth and…

The ECERS-R and ITERS-R are among two of the most widely used observational measures for describing the characteristics of early childhood education and care. This paper describes a professional development programme currently taking place in seven regions across England, designed to train local government staff in the application of the scales as…

As educators become increasingly subject to accountability pressures, maximizing the worth of evaluation is a prudent and realistic stance. This paper suggests useful and valid art program evaluation models: (1) Stufflebeam's (1971) CIPP (context, input, process, and product) model; (2) Stake's Countenance Model (responsive evaluation); (3)…

Competent practice in the field of evaluation calls upon many skills, which all can be taught. This paper suggests one perspective on how these evaluation skills could be acquired. A seven-item question-and-answer format is used to respond to a panel discussing structuring a program to prepare professional evaluators. The following questions are…

The study investigated whether school administrators (n=128) implicitly perceive the "types" of evaluators proposed by Meltsner (1976) when they consider evaluative information. One simulated evaluation report was written to represent each evaluator, differentiated from one another by their norms, expectations, motivations, and training.…