One evening my daughter asked, “Mom, what’s this evaluation you’re busy with all the time?”
“Oh,” I sighed, “it’s hard to explain. Why are you asking all of a sudden?”
“Our public policy lecturer told us today that evaluation is a subversive profession. Is it?”
“Like anything else in evaluation, it depends on who you ask,” I replied.
“Oh, come on, Mom! Enough of your smart talk. So what’s evaluation? And don’t be a smartass.”
“How much time have you got?” I asked in another attempt at evasion.
“All the time in the world. Just start. Right from the beginning. I’ve got patience.”
Through the ingenious use of dialogue, this book discusses—and answers—key questions about evaluation, such as the origins of evaluation knowledge, the historical and social role of evaluation, and concerns about ethics and social justice. How does evaluation deal with the complexity of the real world? How does it deal with and give voice to a broad spectrum of cultures and narratives? And, finally, how can we address the over-arching questions about the duties, rights, and responsibilities of an evaluator?
Through these informal dialogues, important considerations for understanding, conceptualizing, and carrying out evaluation in all sorts of programs and projects are discussed, providing thought-provoking answers regardless of one’s own approach to evaluation. While each chapter can stand alone, together they provide a coherent professional worldview, giving the reader an in-depth understanding of program evaluation as a vital independent profession based on a broad foundation of research and theoretical knowledge.
Both theoretical and practical, this text is an important resource for practitioners, students enrolled in Program Evaluation courses in a variety of disciplines such as education, management, public administration, and social work and their teachers.
With more than thirty years of experience in evaluation, Dr. Miri Levin-Rozalis has served as senior lecturer and head of evaluation at Ben-Gurion University, where she was also the head of the graduate and post-graduate evaluation programs. At the Mofet Institute, she was co-head of the evaluation and measurement program for teachers’ trainers. For several years, she was chairperson of the Israeli Association for Program Evaluation (IAPE), which she helped to establish. She also served as an organizational learning coordinator at the Davidson Institute of Science Education at the Weizmann Institute of Science.
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