My name is Jim Van Haneghan and I am writing about the Consortium for Research on Educational Assessment and Teaching Effectiveness (CREATE). CREATE focuses on educational evaluation and is a useful complement to my participation in the American Evaluation Association (AEA). CREATE was started back in the 1990s by Daniel Stufflebeam and others at the Evaluation Center to support and facilitate effective evaluation practice in educational organizations. Until recently, the organization was named The Consortium for Research on Educational Accountability and Teacher Evaluation. The board of directors and membership of the organization just approved the recent name change to reflect the organization’s concerns with more than just accountability and teacher evaluation.
Each year CREATE puts on the National Evaluation Institute (NEI), a small national conference featuring internationally known speakers, paper presentations, and the awarding of the Jason Millman award, given to someone who has made major contributions to the field of educational evaluation and assessment. Last year the award was given to James Stronge from Willliam and Mary who has international expertise in and has written extensively about teacher evaluation.
Lessons Learned: What makes CREATE and the NEI a useful complement to AEA? First, the small size of the conference makes it easy to build a network of colleagues. Individuals from higher education, k12 districts, evaluation organizations, and independent consultants are all part of CREATE.
Second, elements of educational evaluation that are not seen as often at AEA appear at CREATE. For example, the focus on teacher and personnel evaluation systems in education is one area where I have learned extensively through my participation in CREATE.
A third reason to consider the NEI is that there is the opportunity to see, and often speak to, internationally known speakers. Finally, the conference provides an additional outlet for evaluators to share their work in educational evaluation.
Over the past two years CREATE has been engaged in strategic planning to help keep the organization dynamic and current. We are currently working to redefine and improve our consortium model. Further, the name change of the organization is an effort to reflect more realistically the current state of what CREATE and the NEI stand for as an organization.
Over the next week, entries from CREATE’s community will appear in AEA365. If you find these posts valuable you can learn more by visiting the CREATE conference website. There you can find information about the next NEI (October 10-12 in Atlanta, GA, the week before Evaluation 2013 in Washington, DC) and the organization.
Rad Resource: Many of the invited addresses and talks from past NEI’s can be found in the archives of the web page. Visit those pages to learn more about practices and research surrounding educational evaluation.
The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Consortium for Research on Educational Assessment and Teaching (CREATE) week. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from members of CREATE. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.