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AEA Newsletter
April 2008
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Greetings AEA Colleagues!
I recently returned from a two-day meeting of the AEA's
Board of Directors that left me very excited about the
organization's future. We're experiencing rapid
membership growth, we're in good financial shape,
and we have a great management team and a
dynamic board of directors. One might be tempted to
think that is as much as we could hope to achieve, but
we're not stopping there. We are looking ahead and
thinking about how we should evolve as we grow and
how we can improve our responsiveness to the needs
of our members.
We heard a report on the AEA internal scan that was
conducted among AEA members between July and
February. This scan included a web-based survey of
the entire membership and follow-up interviews and
on-line discussion groups with samples of the
membership. It provided us with an unprecedented
level of information about the makeup of AEA and
members' professional development needs.
You told us about things you like, things you don't like,
and things you need to help achieve your professional
goals. You identified some options through which we
can continue to promote excellence in evaluation
practice, utilization of evaluation findings, and
inclusion in the evaluation community. We're going to
be sharing this information with you in coming
months, and sessions at our November conference in
Denver will showcase the findings as well as the
actions we're taking based on them.
The AEA Board has also been engaged in
discussions over the last several years aimed at
improving our ability to plan and operate more
strategically. We've identified our mission and goals,
developed values statements, and talked about how
we can establish structures that keep us focused on
those objectives while making us more flexible and
responsive. We're now developing a strategic
framework that will help us operationalize this
thinking, and we're asking for input from committee
leaders. We'll be seeking input from members on a
host of issues in coming months, so stay tuned.
It's an important time for AEA. We're excited about the
future, and we look forward to working with you to take
our association to the next level of development.
Bill Trochim, 2008 AEA President
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New Forum Online
Audio and transcript of 2007 Public Issues Forum now available online
The 2007 Public Issues Forum at the annual
conference explored how state-of-the-art knowledge
and expertise in evaluation can be more effectively
linked to the formulation of evaluation policy at the
federal level. Panelists from the National Science
Foundation, the National Institutes of Justice, and the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
addressed three major questions:
- How is evaluation policy established in their
agency?
- What types of evaluation-related input would their
agency welcome from a professional organization
such as the American Evaluation Association?
- What are the means through which AEA could
provide such input?
The audio and written transcript from this
thought-provoking session are now available online
for review and download. This year's downloads join
those from 2006 when the forum focused on the
Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) and its use
in the federal government.
AEA launched the Public Issues Forum in 2006 as
part of its annual conference in order to address timely
and important issues in the field. The forum is
designed to encourage constructive dialogue and
engender awareness among leaders, policy-makers,
and the general public on topics having implications
for the role, image, and implementation of evaluation
in public contexts. Forums encompass a diversity of
views on the selected issue, striving to present
nuanced and thoughtful perspectives that will bring
about deeper understanding. The topic that a forum
addresses will be selected for its relevance and
significance to the field of evaluation, for its
immediacy, and for its location at the interface of
evaluation and the public interest.
For Evaluation 2008, the forum will explore multiple
perspectives on the Politics of Evaluation. Stay tuned
for more details as we draw closer to November.
Go to the Public Issues Forum Online
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Your Input, Please
Tell us about AEA conference session quality
AEA is working to expand its avenues of
communication. We want to hear more from you, our
members, who are the association's most valuable
asset. As one step in this direction, from time to time
we'll seek your thoughts about issues, concerns,
programs, and directions. This is an opportunity for
informal input that can help to inform our broader
thinking and data collection efforts. This month's
questions come from the Conference Policy
Committee and focus on conference session quality:
- How would you describe the general
quality of the sessions at the annual conference?
- Is there anything about session content,
delivery, type of session, or anything else, that has
affected the quality of sessions you have attended? In
what ways?
- What would you like to see done differently to
improve the quality of AEA conference sessions?
Go to
http://www.eval.org/aea08.april.question.asp to
share your ideas.
Think broadly, contribute your thoughts, help make
AEA better!
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Advocacy & Policy Change
New TIG reflects changing interests
AEA periodically spotlights one of its topical interest
groups. This month we spoke with Julia Coffman and
Astrid Hendricks, Co-Chairs of the Advocacy and
Policy Change TIG.
Can you share a brief history of your TIG?
APC
was created in 2007 in response to rapidly growing
interest among evaluators, advocates, and funders
about how to assess hard-to-measure advocacy and
policy change efforts. Innovation was occurring, but
many evaluators were unaware of new approaches
and resources being developed. Establishing the TIG
created an opportunity to help those interested in
advocacy and policy change learn about, engage in,
and contribute to the field's growth.
How does the TIG communicate with its
members?
APC utilizes existing resources to communicate TIG
news and to share with members new developments
in the field. Our TIG was fortunate in that when we
were founded, the organization where our Program
Co-Chair works had an excellent website and
newsletter focused on advocacy and policy change
evaluation. Innovation Network's Advocacy
Evaluation Resource Center maintains a database
of advocacy evaluation resources and offers a free
Advocacy Evaluation Update newsletter that
informs subscribers of new developments, resources,
and perspectives. For more information, visit http://www.innonet.org
What are some of the TIG's
accomplishments?
APC has more than 350 members since its
inception a year ago. The 13 sessions the TIG
sponsored at the 2007 conference were almost all
standing-room only. Sessions covered a wide range
of issues, from evaluating community organizing to
evaluating electronic advocacy efforts. We're also very
proud of our membership's diverse experience base.
Members work at the local, state, and federal levels,
and they evaluate advocacy in the executive,
legislative, administrative, and judicial domains. The
TIG includes a number of advocates in addition to
evaluators and funders and its members are involved
with a broad range of policy issues, including the
protection of animals and the environment.
What are the future goals of the TIG? We
expect our session track at this year's conference to
be bigger and even more diverse. APC's focus
intersects with those of many other TIGs, and we
encourage members from TIGS such as Government;
Systems in Evaluation; Program Theory and Theory-
Driven; Nonprofit and Foundations; and Qualitative
Methods to attend APC sessions. A core focus for
2008 will be connecting with other TIGs; APC hopes to
organize a track of co-sponsored sessions at the
Evaluation 2008 conference.
How can members monitor new
trends? For a look at recent developments in
advocacy and policy change, visit APC's resource
listing at
http://
www.innonet.org/client_docs/File/advocacy/advocacy_
resource_list_nov2007_coffman.doc
How can I become involved? To learn
more, contact APC Co-Chairs
Julia Coffman at
[email protected] or
Astrid Hendricks at
[email protected].
This TIG profile is part of an ongoing effort to
spotlight the goals and activities of the AEA's more
than 40 Topical Interest Groups. TIGs are the most
immediate means in which AEA members can actively
engage and participate in groups targeting specific
interests.
For more information, visit AEA's website.
Go to AEA's TIG Directory
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Engaging Youths
New book provides tools to involve youths
AEA member Kim Sabo Flores has written a book to
help professionals include youth in the evaluation
process and to empower youths to become active
participants. Youth Participatory Evaluation:
Strategies for Engaging Young People is
published by Jossey-Bass Publishing, a Wiley Imprint.
From the Back Cover:
Youth Participatory Evaluation: Strategies for
Engaging Young People is a groundbreaking book
that provides step-by-step, playful, and accessible
activities that have proven effective and can be used by
evaluators, educators, youth workers, researchers,
funders, and children's and human rights advocates in
their efforts to more effectively engage young people.
Adds Sabo Flores:
"The book tells numerous stories of how I have
worked alongside youth participants and adult staff
members to create effective evaluations. It is through
our collective work that I have been able to develop
playful accessible evaluation activities. This book is an
attempt to share these activities with others who may
wish to use them or to advance them. And one of the
things that I have found most touching about
publishing this book is that non evaluators are reading
it. Who could ask for a more flattering outcome?"
Sabo Flores is the founder and principal of Kim Sabo
Flores Consulting. She has been an AEA member for
the last 10 years.
Jossey-Bass Publishing offers AEA members a
special savings on its publications when ordered
directly from the publisher. To receive your 20%
discount, please use the Pomotional Code "AEAF8"
online or by phone (1-800-225-5945).
Go to the Publisher's Website
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Open to the Public
International case studies explore evaluation in society
A new book co-edited by AEA member Jonathan Breul
focuses on evaluation in the public arena and the
struggle to understand how best to use the
information it generates. Open to the Public:
Evaluation in the Public Arena is
published by Transaction Publishers and is the 13th
book in its Comparative Evaluation series.
From the publisher's website: How, when, and
under what circumstances does the actual use of
evaluative information take place, and what are the
forces at play? By compiling and comparing
international case studies, Open to the Public:
Evaluation in the Public Arena considers forces
that make the information produced in evaluations
increasingly "open to the public" and provides insights
into the many factors that influence evaluation and its
use in the public arena. Case studies include such
current topics as "spin doctoring" of information by the
media and this practice's relationship to evaluation
studies, the hotly debated issue of school
performance, and the controversial link between
budget processing and government performance.
Breul is Executive Director of the IBM Center for The
Business of Government and a partner at IBM Global
Business Services.
Go to the Publisher's Website
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CES Conference
May meeting in historic Quebec City
The 2008 Canadian Evaluation Society Conference
will be held May 11-14 at the Chateau Frontenac in
Quebec City. The theme of the 28th annual meeting is
Sharing Heritages and evaluators from every
continent are invited to join in this tradition of sharing
in a spirit of ever-increasing openness to knowledge
and diversity. "This is a wonderful context in which to
express our collective pride in what we have
accomplished, to reflect upon what we have become
and to chart new directions for the profession," says
the CES Conference Organizing Committee. "It's a
great opportunity for the evaluation community to come
together, to strengthen our mutual ties and to share
our heritages."
The CES organizers note that the 2008 CES
Conference theme speaks to the principle, if not the
fact, that each nation, each region, and each cultural
community possesses specific knowledge, know-how
and approaches. The conference is also an
opportunity for evaluators to better structure "world
evaluation heritage" by taking into account a diversity
of viewpoints on various themes promoting rich and
stimulating discussions for both the present and
future, rather than by forced consensus. The
conference objectives are 1) to share your recent
evaluation experiences, with a focus on methodology
and practices and 2) to take an objective look at your
practices in order to promote evaluation development.
Go to the CES website
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Milestones
Changes in the Evaluation Community
In Memoriam: Dr. Egon Guba passed
away on March 26, 2008. The evaluation community
has
lost a leader, teacher, colleague, and friend to many.
While at Ohio State, Dr. Guba was one of the founders
of the Evaluation Center, now housed at Western
Michigan University. He encouraged examination of
scientific positivism through his edited volume, The
Paradigm Dialogue, and, together with Yvonna
Lincoln, authored two groundbreaking methodology
texts, Naturalistic Inquiry and Fourth
Generation Evaluation, as well as numerous other
books and articles. He advocated for broad
stakeholder input to the first edition of The Program
Evaluation Standards, laying the foundation for
their broad acceptance and use. Egon taught for over
twenty years in the School of Education at Indiana
University. His work has had a profound and long
lasting impact on the ways in which many think about
and practice evaluation. The AEA Community extends
its condolences to his family, colleagues, students,
and in particular to his wife and co-author, 1990 AEA
President Yvonna Lincoln.
Congratulations: Dr. David Fetterman,
1993 AEA President, has been selected to receive the
Outstanding Higher Education Professional Award
from the Neag School of Education at the University of
Connecticut. The annual award is based on
scholarship, teaching, and administrative
contributions to higher education and nominees are
drawn from across the spectrum of those working in
higher education contexts. Fetterman is the author of
more than 10 books and myriad articles. His writings
focus primarily on the areas of ethnography and
empowerment evaluation and he currently serves as
the co-chair of AEA's Collaborative, Participatory, and
Empowerment Topical Interest Group. He has
received AEA's Alva and Gunnar Myrdal Practice Award
and Paul F. Lazarsfeld Theory Award. David is the
Director of Evaluation in the Division of Evaluation in
the School of Medicine at Stanford University. David,
who did not know he was nominated, will receive the
award in May during a special ceremony in
Connecticut. Congratulations David!
Your Contributions: Do you know of
someone
who has experienced a significant milestone in the
evaluation community? Please share you milestones
with Gwen Newman, AEA's newsletter editor, at [email protected]
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Get Involved
Get the most out of your membership
A short list of the many things to do right now to
participate in the life of the association. Please click
through to the appropriate item below.
We'll have more to share over the coming months.
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