Today’s cartoon flashback comes from a post featuring ethics stories contributed by a silent collaborator. I think this was my favorite of the bunch. Defining Outlier Evaluators: “Here are the results from your program.” Client: “Those results aren’t accurate.” Evaluators: “How so?” Client: “The bad results are obviously outliers. You need to remove those people from […]
Participatory Evaluation
Today’s cartoon inspiration comes from Leslie Groves and Irene Guijt on Better Evaluation: Participation not for you? Four reflections that might just change your mind For us, “participatory evaluation” requires primary stakeholders to be included as co-evaluators, both to ensure the inclusion of their voices and values in evaluation and to help them strengthen their evaluation capacity. […]
Ethnography and Real Research
If you’ve taken enough sociology classes you likely had this assignment at some point, “go somewhere and watch.” And if it’s a grad class you might get asked to go back to the same place several times. Looking back today, these were some of my most memorable academic moments and something I’ve definitely carried with me over the […]
Summative, Formative and Developmental
Over the years I’ve noticed that many of the most influential thinkers carry with them some great metaphors to help describe their work. It also makes for great cartoon fodder. Today’s cartoon inspired by Michael Quinn Patton from his book on Developmental Evaluation: Distinguished evaluation theorist and practitioner Bob Stake has explained, “When the cook tastes the soup, […]
Human Side of Data
There is this tendency to get wrapped up in tech. If only we had that cool new dashboard or visual. Then we could really take advantage of our data. Of course the actual tech part is not everything. Not anywhere close. Sure, the tech stuff can be neat, but the human side is the […]
Eleanor Chelimsky on who evaluators are
After posting his guest post two weeks ago on the 4 missing ps in evaluation, Rakesh Mohan received a comment via email from Eleanor Chelimsky. For the non evaluators, Eleanor Chelimsky has been incredibly influential to the field in both words and practice, having directed the Program Evaluation and Methodology Division of the U.S. Government Accountability Office […]