Author Archives: Jane Davidson

Genuine Evaluation has a jingle AND a badge!

Lots of fun and creativity this week at the American Evaluation Association conference in San Antonio, Texas: Genuine Evaluation not only has its own jingle, but a button badge! We are distributing button badges only to those who have seen … Continue reading

Posted in About/Definition | Tagged , | 2 Comments

How good is a “good” outcome?

Earlier in the week, I passed on a quote from a review of Ziliak and McCloskey’s (2008) book The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives asserting that: … many researchers are so … Continue reading

Posted in Evaluative rubrics, Values-based | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Sizeless Science?

With apologies to all for our little bit of downtime over the weekend while we changed servers … Here’s an interesting snippet that came through on a listserv recently from industrial/organizational psychologist Paul Barrett, who spotted a recent review from … Continue reading

Posted in Values-based | Tagged , | 11 Comments

Commissioning XGEMs – the sequel

In Monday’s post, Extreme Genuine Evaluation Makeovers (XGEMs) for Commissioning, I discussed a way of kicking off the process of selecting an evaluator for a project by suggesting that well-designed EOIs would often be more informative, less onerous (on both … Continue reading

Posted in Causal inference, Commissioning evaluation, Evaluative questions & answers, Learning from failure, The client's role, Values-based | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Extreme Genuine Evaluation Makeovers (XGEMs) for Commissioning

There may well be some managers out there who have yet to experience the thrill of commissioning a total waste-of-money evaluation. In a keynote for the recent Australasian Evaluation Society conference, I talked about the incredibly ineffective commissioning processes that are often used and that frequently result in evaluations that are, as we say in this part of the planet, “about as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike”. Some of the most important problems are: Continue reading

Posted in Commissioning evaluation, The client's role | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments