roy

Formal Professional Review Systems: Accreditation Historical Foundations. To many, the most familiar formal professional review system is that of accreditation, the process whereby an organization grants approval of institutions such as schools, universities, and hospitals. Beginning in the late 1800s, regional accreditation agencies in the United States gradually supplanted the borrowed western European system of […]

Are published or explicit standards used as part of the review? 1. Is there an existing structure for conducting the review? 2. Are published or explicit standards used as part of the review? 3. Are reviews scheduled at specified intervals? 4. Does the review include opinions of multiple experts? 5. Do results of the review

The Expertise-Oriented Approach The expertise-oriented approach to evaluation is probably the oldest type of formal, public evaluation and, as its name implies, it relies primarily on professional expertise to judge the quality of an institution, program, product, or activity. For example, the merits of a leadership training program for school principals could be assessed by

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

A Classification Schema for Evaluation Approaches We have chosen to classify the many different evaluation approaches into the four categories that we have developed based on our identification of the primary fac- tor that guides or directs the evaluation: 1. Approaches oriented to comprehensive judgments of the quality of the program or product: These approaches

Classifications of Evaluation Theories or Approaches Existing Categories and Critiques In recent years, several evaluators have attempted to categorize evaluation theo- ries for different purposes. Shadish, Cook, and Leviton’s (1995) book was influ- ential in reviewing important evaluation theorists, at least partly to illustrate historical trends and changes in the field, but primarily to identify

Disciplinary Boundaries and Evaluation Methodology. It is ironic that in a field with such a rich array of alternative evaluation approaches, there still ex- ists, among some evaluators, a tendency to fall prey to the law of the instrument 120 Part II • Alternative Approaches to Program Evaluation fallacy2 rather than to adapt or develop

Differences among evaluators and approaches over the years comes from Stevenson and Thomas (2006) One useful framework for explaining the differences among evaluators and approaches over the years comes from Stevenson and Thomas (2006), who ana- lyzed what they called the intellectual contexts for evaluation. They identified three traditions in evaluation that are closely tied

The Influence of Paradigms on Evaluation Practice. These philosophical para- digms, and their implications for methodological choices, have influenced the de- velopment of different evaluation approaches. Some have argued that paradigms and qualitative and quantitative methods should not be mixed because the core beliefs of postpositivists and constructivists are incompatible (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994). As

A Transformative Paradigm. More recently, a new paradigm for evaluation has emerged—the transformative paradigm. It emerged initially, and is still most pow- erful, in international development work and in the developing world, though the paradigm is gaining proponents in the United States and Western countries. Like constructivism and postpositivism, this paradigm emerged in response to