Shelfari: Book reviews on your book blog

How much evidence is needed for policy?

In the last few days before the Australian federal election, a curious $5million advertising campaign has been launched which claims to be advocating evidence-based policy but does nothing of the

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What you measure and how you measure it - the Greek financial example

A salutary reminder that just because things are measured precisely (such as money) doesn’t mean that the measurements are valid or useful. As reported by Louise Story, Landon Thomas Jr and Nelson D. Schwartz, in the New York Times on 13 Feb 2010 :

As in the American subprime crisis and the implosion of the American

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Why genuine evaluation must include causal inference

Is it OK to just document whatever changes happen to people over the life of the program and summarize these in an evaluation report under a heading called “Outcomes”? What if you point out in a disclaimer that you haven’t got any evidence that the program contributed to them? What if you don’t exactly call them “outcomes”? What if it’s just a low-budget evaluation? Answers: No, no, no, and NO! Here’s why

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Misreporting evaluation findings - Example 1

Part of the concern with the report we discussed yesterday (which tracked changes in school milk purchases only without any data on calorie intake or obesity) was in how easily carefully phrased conclusions could be paraphrased as bold statements that went way beyond the data.

The original report provided by the researchers was quite careful to

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What is Genuine Evaluation?

When we think about the type of evaluation we want to do and to support, and the types we want to hold up for critique and as cautionary tales, five elements stand out:

VALUE-BASED -transparent and defensible values (criteria of merit and worth and standards of performance)
EMPIRICAL – credible evidence about what has happened and what

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