Canadian Evaluation Society Project in Support of Advocacy and Professional Development

METHODS

Overview

The topics of this study are worthy of thorough discussion, and we intend to engage CES members and other evaluators in a dialogue throughout the project. In addition to a literature review, we will consult with the evaluation community twice this Spring using interactive forms posted on this website. An international panel of evaluators will draw conclusions based on the consultations. The conclusions will be posted on this site for feedback in the Fall.

If you would like to be more involved in this project, please contact us.

Literature Review

We will review selected texts, articles, and other publications to summarize the evaluation benefits, outputs, and knowledge elements that the authors have identified. View the Resource Page to see the titles of texts that are being considered. To suggest a source for our consideration, please email us.

Consultation 1: April 1 to 12, 2002

The first consultation will take the form of an on-line brainstorming session. We will ask you to describe some of the ways program evaluation can benefit governments, not-for-profit organizations, and businesses. Responses will be posted on the website so you can view and comment on the suggestions made by other people.

Consultation 2: May 13 to 24, 2002

We will post the complete list of benefits on this website, and ask you to help us determine how evaluation produces those benefits. Specifically, we will explore the knowledge and skills required to produce the evaluation outputs that are associated with a given benefit.

Reference Panel

We are assembling a reference group of individuals who will be more actively involved in this project. The group will include a number of Canadian and international evaluators, and will reflect the diversity of the field. Using email, the reference group will draw conclusions from the ideas generated through the consultations and the literature review.

The reference group will discuss the following questions:

1. What exactly are the benefits that evaluation can provide to governments, not-for-profit organizations, and businesses?
2. What exactly are the generic types of output that evaluators can produce that are related to each benefit?
3. How exactly does each type of output contribute to each benefit?
4. In what ways are the outputs unique to evaluation?
5. What are the knowledge elements that are needed to produce the various types of output?
6. For each knowledge element, what section of which commonly available text or publication contains a good description of it?

Although we hope that there will be at least some areas of agreement among reference panel members, we recognize that many topics will be controversial. In our report, we will identify instances where there is not agreement on a particular knowledge element, benefit or output, and indicate why the lack of agreement exists.

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