How do these approaches influence the practice of evaluation today?
Everyone evaluates. As we discussed in Chapter 1, we all form opinions or make judgments about the quality of things we encounter. Such evaluations include everything from the meal we just finished eating or the movie or con- cert we saw last week to more serious endeavors—the program to help students at risk of dropping out at our high school or the parent contact program for par- ents new to our school. Our focus here is not on our individual judgments of something, but on evaluations that are more formal, structured, and public. We connect these personal evaluations with the more formal ones here, though, be- cause the earliest evaluation approaches were concerned, almost exclusively, with judging the quality of something. Those judgments were often derived by
First Approaches: Expertise and Consumer-Oriented Approaches
Orienting Questions
1. What are the arguments for and against using professional judgment as the means for evaluating programs?
2. What are the different types of expertise-oriented approaches? How are they alike and how do they differ?
3. Why is accreditation of institutions of higher education controversial today? How do these controversies reflect the controversies that frequently arise in many evaluations?
4. How is the consumer-oriented evaluation approach like the expertise-oriented approach? How is it different?
5. How do these approaches influence the practice of evaluation today?