Greetings. This is Jean King, an Evaluation Studies professor at the University of Minnesota for another three months. My life-long goal as an evaluator has been to leave this messy world of ours a better place as a result of my work, even knowing that the measurement of that outcome is highly challenging. Some call …
A Look at Language Week: Renaming Social Betterment by Jean King Read More »
This is Jean King, University of Minnesota, chair of AEA’s Competencies Task Force, and John LaVelle, Louisiana State University, enthusiastic Task Force member. This week we and other members of the Competencies Task Force are excited to share with you our progress toward developing a set of AEA evaluator competencies. To put these efforts in …
This is part of a series remembering and honoring evaluation pioneers leading up to Memorial Day in the USA (May 30). I am Jean King, professor at the University of Minnesota and, like my colleague John McLaughlin, who collaborated with me on this In Memoriam, an original AEA member. I met Bob Ingle for the …
We’re Jean King and Frances Lawrenz (University of Minnesota) and Elizabeth Kunz Kollmann (Museum of Science, Boston), members of a research team studying the use of concepts from complexity theory to understand evaluation capacity building (ECB) in networks. We purposefully designed the Complex Adaptive Systems as a Model for Network Evaluations (CASNET) case study research …
This is Jean King and Gayra Ostegaard Eliou, from the University of Minnesota, members of the Complex Adaptive Systems as a Model for Network Evaluations (CASNET) research team. NSF funded CASNET to provide insights on (1) the implications of complexity theory for designing evaluation systems that “promote widespread and systemic use of evaluation within a …
This is Jean King, professor of Evaluation Studies at the University of Minnesota and mother of the Minnesota Evaluation Studies Institute (MESI—pronounced “messy” because evaluation is that way). MESI began 20 years ago to provide high quality evaluation training to all comers: evaluation practitioners, students, accidental evaluators, and program staff and administrators. We are fortunate …
MESI Week: Jean King on Bringing Evaluation Training to Life Read More »
Hello everyone—Laurie Stevahn (Seattle University) and Jean King (University of Minnesota) here—continuing to grapple with issues relevant to program evaluator competencies (whether essential sets exist) and usefulness (if enhanced practice results). In fact, for over a decade we have been working on a formal set of evaluator competencies, trying to answer the daunting question of …
Jean King and Laura Pejsa, Minnesota Evaluation Studies Institute (MESI), here, with broad smiles on our faces. We are the proud coaches who are wrapping up this week of posts written by our creative student consultants about ways to evaluate a conference (using exit surveys of Ignite sessions, network visualizing, Twitter, and video clips). Progressive …
Greetings from Jean King and Laura Pejsa from the Minnesota Evaluation Studies Institute (MESI) at the University of Minnesota. This week we will be introducing you to a crop of graduate student evaluators who (we think) made quite a splash at the AEA conference last month. If you attended, you may have seen one or …
My name is Valerie Jean Caracelli, and I am a Senior Social Science Analyst in the Center for Evaluation Methods and Issues, Applied Research and Methods team at the U.S. Government Accountability Office. As we greet the 5th year anniversary of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018, it is useful to reflect on federal evaluation and its use in decision making prior to the passage of the Evidence Act. In 2013 a series of evaluation questions were introduced into a generalizable survey of federal civilian managers and supervisors to obtain their perspectives on several results-oriented management topics, including the extent of and barriers to evaluation use. The survey results indicated just over a third (37 percent) of federal managers reported that an evaluation had been completed in the past 5 years on any program, operation, or project they were involved in. GAO concluded that agencies’ lack of evaluations may be the greatest barrier to their ability to inform program management and policy making.
