Hello, AEA365 community, and happy Conference Week from Indianapolis! The AEA staff have been working overtime to prepare for our biggest event of the year. Whether you will be joining us for the conference or not, you can keep up with our happenings via the AEA365 blog. See you around!
-Liz DiLuzio, Lead Curator
We are the Student Evaluation Case Competition Working Group (Dana Linnell, Steve Mumford, Carolina De La Rosa Mateo, Julian Nyamupachitu, Rana Gautam, Jennifer Yessis, Christine Roseveare, and Asma Ali). We’re excited to tell you about the inaugural competition!
How it Began
Evaluation case competitions have a long history, beginning in 1996 when Michael Obrecht founded the Canadian case competition. Czech Republic then started a competition in 2016, before the World Evaluation Case Competition (WECC; https://www.worldcasecomp.net/) was established in 2018. In 2021, both India and Cameroon began competitions. Since 2018, 185 students in 41 teams across 27 countries have competed in the world competition.
Only one team in each country can compete in the world competition, so AEA enlisted us to start a US competition last fall to choose the team to represent the United States in the 2023 WECC later this year. Our working group was established to create and develop the case competition, including recruiting the case organization and creating the case, determining the competition rules, selecting and supporting judges, soliciting team registrations, and managing the entire competition process from start to finish. We intentionally chose to align the US competition closely with the WECC’s rules and procedures.
The AEA case competition meets the associations’ values of a global and international evaluation community (iii) and the continual development of evaluation professionals and evaluators from under-represented groups (iv). The competition also meets the end goals of 1.4 by providing student members with opportunities to develop leadership skills and competencies needed to practice evaluation and contribute to the association and evaluation knowledge base. The competition is a great way for students to develop their evaluator competencies and prepare for a future career in evaluation.
How it Went
A total of 16 teams—74 total graduate students supported by 28 coaches—competed in the inaugural US evaluation case competition on June 3, 2023. It was a jam-packed day in which students spent seven hours reviewing the case and developing an evaluation proposal for the case organization. The case organization this year was Indiana Humanities, and the case involved the Advancing Racial Equity Collection Development (ARECD) program, which was chosen for its location and relevance for the upcoming AEA conference in Indianapolis, IN and its theme of storytelling.
We are pleased to announce that Evalu850 won the competition! The entire team received one year of free membership, as well as free registration for this year’s conference. Their submission, as well as that of the runner up Metamorphosis Methods, can be found on the SCC website.
Join us at the AEA conference to recognize and support the competition! We will have a panel presentation on the case competition TOMORROW (Thursday, October 12) from 11:30am to 12:30pm in Grand Ballroom 3, which will provide an overview of the competition before hearing the experiences of case organization Indiana Humanities and the winning team. Additionally, the winning team will be acknowledged during tomorrow’s (Friday) awards plenary session from 8:30-10am. We hope you can join us in congratulating them and celebrating all participants in the inaugural US evaluation case competition!
According to evaluation surveys gathered from participants in the competition, most participants were very or at least somewhat satisfied with the overall experience. As one student said, “The competition was such a great experience! . . . It was a fun and exciting way to engage with a real-world case in a meaningful way. It never felt like this was a hypothetical evaluation but something that we carefully and thoughtfully wanted to evaluate.”
Looking Forward
We have received a lot of great feedback from student participants, coaches, and judges that we will incorporate into next year’s competition. We hope the competition will be even bigger and better next year! If you are interested in joining the competition working group, volunteering as a judge, or suggesting a case organization, please email scc@eval.org. Information about next year’s competition will be shared on the SCC website in the new year!
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