Michael Scriven to be our celebrity guest blogger next week!

Many evaluators on earth would list Michael Scriven in their top shortlist of huge contributors to the conceptualization and development of evaluation as a profession and as a discipline. We are delighted to announce that Michael will be our celebrity guest blogger next week (starting on April 19th). Make sure you subscribe to our feed (email or RSS, plus comments) so you don’t miss any of the discussion!

If you’re looking for a thought-provoking week of lively interaction, you won’t be disappointed. Michael has sent through a short description of his agenda for the week ahead. This is a precursor discussion for a face-to-face, on-campus workshop at the excellent (and very reasonably priced) Claremont Graduate University summer evaluation institute (we’ll keep you posted when this is announced).

Time for a Revolution? Rethinking evaluation from the ground up.

There’s a great deal of well-trodden ground in program evaluation today, the core materials in the texts, courses, and workshops, and lists of competencies; so—maybe it’s time to reconsider the whole enterprise. That means looking at the usual assumptions underlying data-gathering, the usual choices of data-analysis, methodological options, evaluation theories, all the way to presentations and thereafter. We’re not going to cover all that in detail, but we’ll pick some highlights and try to shake up the usual thinking a little. For example, we’ll suggest that the usual models or theories of evaluation really aren’t that; that the qualitative researchers are their own worst enemies but everyone else’s best friends; that it’s time to look outside program evaluation (again) for ways to improve program evaluation; and that the most important branch of evaluation is over 2000 years old, but that’s only .1% as old as evaluation; and….bring your own concerns and your favorite dogmas—we’ll have lots of time for discussion and questions.

As with our earlier celebrity guest blogger, Nan Wehipeihana, we will both be blogging alongside Michael, responding to topics he and our readers raise, and adding other topics to the mix.

Michael Scriven has been hugely influential in evaluation for decades. Some of his most valuable contributions have (in our view) been:

• clearly defining the very core of evaluation – the fundamental logic and methodologies that distinguish evaluation from other related activities such as applied research
• showing how evaluation logic and methodology is the common thread running through the evaluation of programs, policies, personnel, policies, products, etc – and how ideas from one of these domains can be fruitfully applied in others
• identifying, in the Key Evaluation Checklist, the “must have” ingredients that every evaluation should cover in order to get to sound, defensible conclusions

If you don’t have Michael’s Evaluation Thesaurus (4th ed.) and Hard-Won Lessons in Program Evaluation on your Genuine Evaluation bookshelf, be sure to get them! For a look at what Michael’s evaluation approach looks like in practice, check out the AEA 2009 presentation on the Heifer project.

Michael Scriven was born in England, took honors degrees in mathematics and then in the philosophy of mathematical logic at the University of Melbourne, and his doctorate in philosophy at Oxford. His 400+ publications span fields as diverse as mathematics, philosophy, psychology, education, critical thinking, technology studies, computer studies, parapsychology, and evaluation.

He is an ex-President of the American Educational Research Association, and of the American Evaluation Association, and the recipient of the American Evaluation Association’s Lazarsfeld Medal for contributions to evaluation theory.