For several decades members of the American Evaluation Association have discussed and disputed the issue of evaluator certification. Our past inability to agree on a certification solution may have been partially caused by the weaknesses of traditional certification systems, which rely on candidates obtaining a degree and completing a…

In recent years, performance management (PM) has become a buzzword in public sector organizations. Well-functioning PM systems rely on valid performance data, but critics point out that conflicting rationale or logic among professional staff in recording information can undermine the quality of the data. Based on a case study of social service…

The issue of translatability is pressing in international evaluation, in global transfer of evaluative instruments, in comparative performance management, and in culturally responsive evaluation. Terms that are never fully understood, digested, or accepted may continue to influence issues, problems, and social interactions in and around and after…

Culturally responsive evaluation and culturally responsive Indigenous evaluation (CRIE) within the broader field of evaluation are not often included in Western literature nor are they known or used by the majority of mainstream evaluators. In order to address this literature and practice gap, this article offers an overview and a broader origin…

This essay addresses challenges in evaluating collaboration by examining two distinct approaches to its measurement. Evaluators frequently assess collaboration on the basis of relationships, climate, and expectations (RCE), and, less often, via extent of collaboration (EC). RCE measures are based on perceptions by coalition members regarding…

As the definition of organization has evolved, so have the approaches used to evaluate organizational performance. During the past 60 years, organizational theorists and management scholars have developed a comprehensive line of thinking with respect to organizational assessment that serves to inform and be informed by the evaluation discipline.…

Over the past year, the Board of Directors of the American Evaluation Association (AEA) has been discussing ways in which AEA can strengthen its relationships and build collaborative partnerships within the international evaluation community as well as increase AEA members' awareness of and capacity to engage issues that shape evaluation…

Using a case example of an innovative sanitation solution in a slum setting, this study explores the usefulness of the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique in a program planning and evaluation context. Using a qualitative image-based method to map people's mental models of ill-structured problems such as sanitation can aid program planners and…

This article presents the principles and findings of developing a new participatory assessment of development (PADev) evaluation approach that was codesigned with Dutch nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and northern and southern research institutes over a period of 4 years in the context of rural development in Ghana and Burkina Faso. Although…

Evaluating the longer-term sustainability of government programs and policies seems in many ways to go beyond the boundaries of typical evaluation practice. Not only have intervention failures over time been difficult to predict, but the question of sustainability itself tends to fall outside current evaluation thinking, timing and functions. This…

Evaluation capacity building (ECB) has progressed as a concept since it was the conference theme of the American Evaluation Association in the year 2000. This commentary poses some questions about underexamined issues in ECB about organizations, evaluators, and funders.

The first article in this series traces the initial development of the concept of evaluation use. As a field, evaluation has always paid attention to the potential for use, both in decision-making and in changing people's thinking. The broad history of the field as we know it today stemmed from two streams: one focused on tests and measurement,…

Sound evaluation planning requires numerous decisions about how constructs in a program theory will be translated into measures and instruments that produce evaluation data. This article, the first in a dialogue exchange, examines how decisions about measurement are (and should be) made, especially in the context of small-scale local program…

It is a matter of concern when large, federally funded programs are evaluated using designs that produce misleading information. In this article, we discuss problems associated with an evaluation design that was adopted by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) to document the performance of a major early…

Debra Rog presented the 2014 Eleanor Chelimsky Forum address, offering ways to integrate evaluation theory and practice by abundant use of practice examples. These examples illustrate the effective use of the Ladder of Abstraction from semantics, working from the concrete to the abstract and back again.