Shared knowledge and experience from the global evaluation community.
In Aoteoroa New Zealand the use of rubrics has been adopted across a number of institutions to help ensure there is transparent and clear assessment that respects and includes diverse lines of evidence in evaluation.
The term "rubric" is often used in education to refer to a systematic way of setting out the expectations for students in terms of what would constitute poor, good and excellent performance.
There is increasing recognition that a theory of change can be useful when planning an evaluation. A theory of change is an explanation of how activities are understood to contribute to a series of outcomes and impacts.
Evaluating projects which deal with sensitive issues, such as illegal practices, stigmatized practices, personal behaviour or traumatizing events, are very difficult to manage, as is collecting data on those issues.
There is increasing discussion about the potential relevance of ideas and methods for addressing complexity in evaluation. But what does this mean? And is it the same as addressing complication?
It is neither relevant nor useful to either only criticise randomised control trials (RCT) or treat them as the only choice for rigorous impact evaluation (IE).
Most of the work done in development is done in collaboration, in partnership with individuals or organizations who contribute to a particular task or project we are working on.
Across the world evaluation associations provide a supportive community of practice for evaluators, evaluation managers and those who do evaluation as part of their service delivery or management job.
There are many decisions to be made in an evaluation – its purpose and scope; the key evaluation questions; how different values will be negotiated; what should be the research design and methods for data collection and analysis; how information will be
As part of developing the BetterEvaluation site, we ran an "Evaluation Challenge" process, inviting people to submit their biggest challenges in evaluation, and then inviting experts to suggest ways to address these.
This week on BetterEvaluation we're presenting Questions and Answers about logic models. A logic model represents a program theory - how an intervention (such as a program, project or policy) is understood to contribute to its impacts.
Better meetings can improve the quality of decisions and the level of engagement of stakeholders.
Many problems with evaluations can be traced back to the Terms of Reference (ToR) - the statement of what is required in an evaluation. Many ToRs are too vague, too ambitious, inaccurate or not appropriate.
The challenges of conducting evaluation in situations of conflict and fragility have been well documented. They have been widely experienced and understood and therefore are not outlined in this post.
