EDPSY 498.  THEORIES OF EDUCATIONAL EVALUATION

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Subtitle this spring:  Using a Delphi Technique with Leading Evaluation Specialists to Study Key Issues in the Field

As taught over the years, this course is advanced study of program evaluation in education and related fields, investigating its purposes and procedures, with attention to settings, personnel, and performance; with review of principal theories; and study of models, histories, political contexts, ethics, and the nature of evidence.

During this Spring, 2000, semester, the class will organize the study and advancement of a small number of current theoretical issues.  That organization will utilize the Delphi Technique, a disciplined way of facilitating communication among experts from different languages, cultures, experiences and across various barriers.  The aim is not necessarily to achieve consensus about the issue but to explore its complexities and irregular implications so that, perhaps everywhere, the issue is better stated and can be better conceptualized.

Among the evaluation issues for possible study (the students will suggest and select others):

1. Is something wrong if an evaluator or evaluation group consistently finds its clients programs commendable and without serious flaw?
2. Should an evaluation contract always be a tacit promise to seek and to represent the quality of the evaluand?
3. Is the concept of population so foreign to the evaluation of single programs that ideas of statistical significance  and generalization should be avoided?
4. Is the impact of ordinary educational programs so complex, circumstantial, and differently perceived, and so evasive of measurement, that it is problematic to promise to offer to evaluate program impact?
5. Does the evaluator have greater responsibility to keep from hurting the poor or social servants serving the poor (teachers, nurses, cops) than to keep from hurting more privileged parties?
6. Does the evaluator have a responsibility to other evaluators, the profession, the guild?
7. Is program evaluation racist?
8. In assessing the quality of an educational program, should one seek a balance between short term effects and long term effects?
9. Should evaluators make recommendations?

Mel Mark, editor of American Journal of Evaluation has expressed a bit of interest in publishing the result of our issue development.