Bill, are you still in program evaluation business? I saw from your email
signature that you moved from San Francisco to Menlo Park to SRI (gosh, I
miss California!). Anyway, I wonder if in negotiation with evaluation
stakeholders you use existing types of program assessment or you have to
develop new or modify existing ones to find a compromise in diverse and,
probably, often conflicting goals of the stakeholders? Also, have you
noticed that stakeholders change their positions during the process of
deciding of what are the goals and how to assess the program?
Take care,
Eugene
PS Are you going Montreal for AERA?
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bill Penuel [mailto:bpenuel@unix.sri.com]
> Sent: Friday, February 26, 1999 12:02 PM
> To: xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu
> Subject: assessment and evaluation
>
>
> One understanding I take of the difference between assessment and
> evaluation is the unit of analysis. Typically, individual students' or
> groups of students' performance is _assessed_ with respect to a particular
> task, while programs, schools, and other activity settings are
> the focus of
> _evaluation_. Evaluation's purposes are often multiple: accountability,
> program improvement, to sit on shelves....
>
> People do of course talk about evaluation in psychological terms for
> individuals, but I think that meaning is close to the kind of distinction
> Eugene is making here between the two terms, namely that this involves a
> normative judgment of the assessment results used to define a course of
> "remediation."
>
> I'm also leery of the distinction between assessment and evaluation
> altogether, though I think the distinction as it has been used in
> the field
> has practical significance closely related to our discussion of portfolio
> assessment. Namely, that once assessments are used for
> evaluation purposes
> by others in more powerful positions than they, they often are
> perceived by
> teachers as much less useful for driving instruction and work with
> individual students. (This is not to say assessment of students by
> teachers is not characterized by the same kind of politics, though at a
> different institutional level.)
>
> Bill
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Bill Penuel, PhD
> Research Social Scientist
> Center for Technology in Learning
> SRI International
> 333 Ravenswood Avenue, Mailstop BS116
> Menlo Park, CA 94025
> tel: 650-859-5001
> fax: 650-859-4605
>
> Check out our websites at:
>
>
>
http://www.sri.com/policy/ctl/
http://www.cilt.org
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