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Tag Archives: media
More utterly uncritical media reporting of evaluation
As an evaluator, or even as an interested member of the public, what very basic fundamental information would you expect to see in a newspaper article that kicked off like this?
Chiefs get good marks even if departments don’t
Public sector leaders are mostly embracing challenges thrown to them by the Government, though at least one is “lost at sea”, a report says.
The Trans Tasman Media report, which ranks government agencies and bosses, has found that chief executives are generally performing better than their departments. Continue reading
An apple a day – or cherry-picking the studies?
Why can’t newspapers be more critical when they report findings from research and evaluation, and provide easy links to more details? A new study by researchers from Australia’s major government research instution (the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation – … Continue reading
‘Fast failure’ and Work-Out: Organizational cultures that support learning from failure
Learning from failure has received very little attention in evaluation, but the management literature has been discussing it since the 1990s. The real challenge is building an organizational culture where not only is experimentation encouraged, but it is not necessarily a career-limiting move to produce failures, mistakes, and negative results. Organizational leaders have a huge part to play in setting the tone and showing through their actions that learning from failure is important. And for government agencies in particular, the media has an important part to play in supporting rather than undermining genuine evaluation. Continue reading
The Friday Funny: Media representation of results …
A spot of evaluation humor (in the form of a cartoon) to follow up on recent posts about media misreporting of evaluation concepts and findings … Continue reading
Posted in Appropriate reporting, Friday Funnies
Tagged accuracy, evaluation reporting, humor, media
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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)