November 2007

EDC to Speak at Conference Focused on Evaluation and Learning

Researchers from EDC are participating in the annual conference of the American Evaluation Association (AEA) held this month in Baltimore, Maryland. AEA is an international professional association of evaluators devoted to the application and exploration of evaluation. The organization has approximately 5000 members representing all 50 states in the U.S. as well as over 60 foreign countries.

November 7

When Does Evaluation Not Feel Like Evaluation? Embedding Evaluation Activities Into Programs
Leslie Goodyear (session chair)

Embedding evaluation within program activities is a way to encourage programs to engage in ongoing, continuous evaluation. The presenters in this session, evaluators of projects funded by the National Science Foundation's ITEST (Information Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers) program, will discuss the ways in which they have worked with projects to embed evaluation within project activities and the learnings, both programmatic and evaluative, that come from their experiences. The chair and discussant for the session will tie together these presentations with information about the ITEST program and the evaluation research work in which these presenters are involved.

Related Web site
http://www2.edc.org/itestlrc/

Measuring Program Fidelity Through Factor Analysis: A Developmental Process
Tara Weatherholt

The purpose of this paper is to describe the process of developing and validating a set of instruments designed to assess the implementation fidelity of the eMINTS program as it is scaled up to other states.

Designing Effective Multi-Country Evaluations: Lessons Learned From a Large Scale Teacher Training Program
Roshni Menon and Daniel Light

The objectives of this presentation are to delineate the inherent challenges in developing an evaluation design that can be used in multiple countries and to offer the audience some proven strategies to think about when planning such an evaluation.

November 8

The Role of Representation in Democratic Accountability and Evaluation
Leslie Goodyear

This presentation will focus on addressing representation in evaluation—how people's lives and experiences are represented in and through evaluations—to highlight the need for forms of representation in evaluation that reflect the complex contexts in which people live and work.

Leslie Goodyear also chairs the session which this presentation is part, Accountability, Democracy and Representation in the Global Evaluation Context

November 9

Educating for Intelligent Belief in Evaluation
Leslie Goodyear (Session Chair)

Increasingly, what goes on in the name of evaluation is not about judging value but about the assurance of conformance to plan (e.g., quality assurance, performance monitoring, and impact evaluation). What is involved in learning evaluation as a special kind of critical appraisal, inspection, questioning, scrutiny, and judgment of value? How and where does this learning take place? How is this way of learning evaluation of central importance to our understanding of democracy and the idea of public responsibility for the common good?

November 10

Articulating Authentic and Rigorous Science Education Evaluation Through the Inquiry Science Instruction Observation Protocol (ISIOP)
Daphne Minner and Neil Schiavo

This session addresses questions of how evaluators select and use an observation protocol, like ISIOP. Small group discussion will center on questions of: 1) What factors do and should evaluators consider when selecting an observation protocol? 2) What guidance do evaluators need to use an observation protocol?

Learm more about the AEA Conference:
http://www.eval.org/eval2007/

type full url here

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