Category Archives: Aspects of Genuine Evaluation

Evaluation of marketing – grappling with the important but hard to measure outcomes

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Jane Davidson

  “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” — Albert Einstein It’s a familiar discussion in the evaluation world – the importance of getting approximate answers to important questions about what really … Continue reading →

Posted in Appropriate criteria and standards, Appropriate measurement, Business & industry | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Getting the facts straight on youth unemployment rates

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Patricia Rogers

Old mistake in today’s article on European responses to austerity measures – here, as reported by Karen Kissane in The Age in Melbourne: Meanwhile, in Greece, a country spiralling into poverty with more than half of its young people unemployed, … Continue reading →

Posted in Appropriate inference, Appropriate measurement, Appropriate reporting | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Credentialing – identifying the ‘core’ vs ‘specialized’ competencies

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Jane Davidson

There’s a great discussion going on right now on the AEA Thought Leaders’ Forum. This week it’s being led by Jean King, who has raised the question of credentialing for evaluators. Not all our subscribers are AEA members and following … Continue reading →

Posted in About/Definition, Commissioning evaluation, Evaluation team composition, Values-based | Tagged , | 3 Comments

The Friday Funny: How to write like a scientist

Posted on April 6, 2012 by Patricia Rogers & Jane Davidson

A couple of years ago we quoted a paper on psychological research called “Keeping it simple” (Peterson & Park, 2010) that observed: … the evidence of history is clear that the research studies with the greatest impact in psychology are … Continue reading →

Posted in Appropriate reporting, Friday Funnies | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Friday Funny: Acceptance of evaluative conclusions

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Patricia Rogers & Jane Davidson

It was Michael Scriven‘s birthday this week, which is a fine time to introduce our Friday Funny with a short quote from the Evaluation Thesaurus, which lists the following entry. As evaluators, we are all familiar with this phenomenon in … Continue reading →

Posted in Friday Funnies, Learning from failure, Personnel evaluation | Tagged , , | 1 Comment