-
Recent Posts
- Evaluation of marketing – grappling with the important but hard to measure outcomes
- The Friday Funny: A surrealistic mega-analysis of redisorganization theories
- Getting the facts straight on youth unemployment rates
- The Friday Funny: Negotiating the budget
- The Friday Funny: Evaluation and content expertise
Recent Comments
- Michael Scriven on Evaluation of marketing – grappling with the important but hard to measure outcomes
- Kathleen Lynch on The Friday Funny: Negotiating the budget
- Heather Nunns on Friday Funny – 10 ways of knowing you’ve been an evaluator too long
- Tarina MacDonald on 9 golden rules for commissioning a waste-of-money evaluation
- Tarina MacDonald on Valuing cultural expertise – in $$ terms
Archives
Category Archives: Education
£6 million over 5 years – and STILL no genuine evaluation of Blueprint?
When a large and expensive evaluation fails to produce useful results, it’s worth seeing if at least it can be useful as a cautionary tale. Blueprint is a UK Government-funded drugs education programme consisting of five components: drug education in … Continue reading
Posted in Adequate scope, Causal inference, Causal inference strategies, Education, Evaluation team composition, Evaluative questions & answers, Government programs, Learning from failure, The client's role
Tagged Causal inference, comparisons, drug education, government, sample size, statistical power, UK
1 Comment
Languaging in evaluation – raising fewer hackles vs. clarity of message
Languaging (finding ways for difficult or complex ideas to make sense in different contexts) is a very important issue for getting people to buy into (and take action based on) evaluation findings, particularly when some aspect of a program is not doing well. Positive languaging can be highly effective for getting stakeholders to buy into not-so-positive findings. However, we do need to be wary of defaulting to positive, ‘comfort zone’ language all the time…. Continue reading
Posted in Education, Learning from failure
Tagged evaluative interpretation, failure, languaging, reporting, Utilization focus
2 Comments
Investing In Innovation – a need to apply what we know about evidence-based policy
The new funding rules for the US Department of Education’s $650 million Investing in Innovation appear based on an out-of-date model of evidence-based policy and hierarchy of evidence. Recent developments in our understanding of evidence-based policy would suggest changes are needed to the selection criteria and to how successful proposals will be evaluated. Continue reading
The Impact-o-meter
Is certainty of measurement the most important criterion for impact evaluation? Colin Burrows has set forward a tongue-in-cheek proposal for measuring the impact of research undertaken in universities – the Impact-o-meter. This satirical piece raises serious questions about the cost, … Continue reading
Posted in Appropriate measurement, Education, Friday Funnies, Uncategorized
Tagged measurement
Leave a comment
The media and evaluation reporting – clueless or unscrupulous?
Most lay people can grasp the difference between grading/rating and ranking, so what’s wrong with the media? Following on from Patricia Rogers’ recent posts about the misreporting of evaluation findings, this post looks at an example from the New Zealand media (reporting on the new National Standards for literacy and numeracy) of leading the public astray with a complete lack of understanding of this very fundamental evaluation concept. Jane also ponders the reasons why the mainstream media in particular gets this kind of thing wrong so often … Continue reading
Jane at Real Evaluation
Patricia at CIRCLE (RMIT)