Ed Eval TIG Week: A Community Approach for Informing and Advancing Educational Evaluation by Carrie Wiley

Hi there! I’m Carrie Wiley, current chair of the PreK-12 Educational Evaluation TIG and senior researcher at the Human Resources Research Organization (HumRRO). In honor of Teacher Appreciation Week, we are sharing tips and insights learned from the various research and evaluation settings in PreK-12 education.

Our TIG’s mission is to raise the quality of education evaluation by serving the professional needs of PreK-12 education evaluators. As such, we are always looking for new members and for improved opportunities to engage with our current members. Given the diverse nature of educational evaluation we need to grow and maintain a community of evaluators, educators, and stakeholders to help support our mission. The saying, “it takes a village community” (or more specifically, a community) is particularly pertinent to education. It takes a community to support educators’ mission to help students succeed. It takes a community to determine which programs and professional development opportunities work as intended and in what conditions do they or do they not work. It takes a community to ensure educational evaluators and researchers are using rigorous, appropriate, and innovative methods. It takes a community to better understand the non-cognitive needs of students. Together, our community will provide the knowledge and supports needed to advance our field into the future.

Hot Tip 1: There are various ways to become engaged with our TIG. Just reach out to us at PreK12.Ed.Eval.TIG@gmail.com.

Hot Tip 2: Don’t be hesitant to become involved with our TIG just because you identify with other TIGs. Multiple TIG identification is expected—that’s what makes us good evaluators. We want educational evaluation to be informed by your interests and expertise in data visualization, STEM, quantitative methods, mixed methods, and the list goes on!  

Hot Tip 3: Meet us at the 2019 AEA annual meeting in Minneapolis. We love Minneapolis and we’d love for you to hang out with us at our TIG Business Meeting! Don’t be fooled—we’re not actually all about business; we use this time to catch up, hand out books, and meet new members.

Rad Resources: You can follow us:

  • TIG Websitehttp://comm.eval.org/prk12/home.
  • Facebook: We have migrated conversations from our old community page to our GROUP page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/907201272663363/. Please join our group, as we use Facebook to supplement our website and to communicate with each other, share ideas and resources, and just get to know friends, colleagues, and newcomers who have similar interests. Anyone who visits the page is welcome to post and share other links and resources with the group.
  • LinkedIn: Search for us on LinkedIn as PreK-12 Educational Evaluation TIG. This is a members-only group, so please send a request to join in order to see the content.
  • Twitter: We are tweeting with the user name PreK-12 Ed. Eval. Follow @PK12EvalTIG at https://twitter.com/PK12EvalTIG.

The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Ed Eval TIG Week with our colleagues in the PreK-12 Educational Evaluation Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our Ed Eval TIG members. 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.

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