See AEA's Mission, Vision, Values 

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My name is Kathy Newcomer. I am a professor and the director of the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, home of The Evaluator's Institute (TEI), at The George Washington University. I serve on the AEA Board, and have previously served as President of the Washington Evaluators.

For over 30 years I have taught the art and the science of program evaluation to Master of Public Administration, Master of Public Policy and PhD in Public Policy and Administration students, as well as staff in the U.S. Governmental Accountability Office, the federal Offices of Inspector General and in many other federal agencies. And I have been fortunate to be able to provide program evaluation training to public servants in other countries including Egypt, Taiwan, Colombia, Nicaragua and Canada. In addition to teaching, I have been evaluating public and non-public programs in the Washington, D.C. area for well over 20 years.

The values of our Association, succinctly expressed in the AEA's Values Statement, permeate my evaluation teaching and practice. I place heavy emphasis in my teaching and mentoring on facilitating development of ethical practices, cultural competence and capacity to evaluate programs in order to serve the public welfare. I press my students to reflect on the role of values and ethical issues in evaluation practice through requiring them to design evaluations for real clients (and sometimes implement them as well), and to role play in difficult scenarios drawn from real life evaluation situations. My students are asked to make systematic assessments of the consequences of the decisions they make when faced with ethically ambiguous situations to help them sharpen their ethical sensibilities. Through intentionally deliberating on how different courses of action reflect the important values we honor, my students and I contemplate the impact of our values on our work and on our ability to serve the public good in our work.

Most of my students will not be professional evaluators, but they will lead and manage in public and nonprofit organizations. Thus, they need evaluative thinking skills, as well as an understanding of how to build and use evaluation capacity to improve programs and public services. Values, more than technical tools, will shape the decisions my students make as they strive to design, implement and improve public policies and programs. Understanding of and appreciation for the fundamental values that AEA has so eloquently elaborated will be the longer lasting gifts I strive to bestow on them and those whom they serve in their public service careers.

From Susan Kistler, AEA's Executive Director

 

Over the past year, we've had quite a few requests to share the behind-the-scenes of AEA's projects as they have application outside of the Association. We're hoping to develop a 'how to' series, drawing on lessons learned from AEA's own programs. But, where should we start? Which of the topics would you like to see covered in 2013?

 

Here are the four options, and details of each. Go to this post on aea365 to cast your vote.

1. How to create video slideshows
2. How to set up/leverage/share a Twitter Feed
3. How to prepare/record/distribute webinars
4. How to set up/distribute/promote a blog

Details:

1. We created video slideshows from the pictures from AEA's photobooth at Evaluation 2012. Here's an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syzazSkBhRI. These are great for engaging stakeholders or as part of a reporting plan for evaluations using photovoice for data collection and reflection. We can share the free tool, how to create shows from your own photos, and tips for incorporating text and non-photo images.
2. The innovative evaluation team was all over the 2012 AEA conference, encouraging people to use Twitter and share lessons learned with the hashtag #evalAHA during #eval12. Twitter is great for connecting with certain stakeholders, and getting the word out about a project or product. We can show you how to set up a Twitter account, how to find and subscribe to twitter-based content, and how to share a stream of Twitter reflections with the world like we did on the Evaluation 2012 homepage at http://www.eval.org/eval2012/default.asp.
3. AEA delivered over 40 Coffee Break Webinars in 2012. Three of our most popular are the International Series that is publically available at http://comm.eval.org/coffee_break_webinars/CoffeeBreak/InternationalSeries. Webinars are great for providing training, distance-based reporting and meetings, and promoting your consultancy's services. We can share the tech tools we use, how to prepare, deliver, record, and share, and how to avoid the many pitfalls we've encountered.
4. aea365, AEA's free Tip-a-Day blog by and for evaluators may be found at http://www.aea365.org/blog/. We can share how to set up a blog for your consultancy or evaluation project, how to make it easy for readers to subscribe, how to monitor key indicators, and tips we've learned along the way.

From Paul Brandon, Editor-in-Chief, New Directions for Evaluation

As of January 1, I took over as Editor-in-Chief (EIC) of New Directions for Evaluation (NDE). I am honored to have been selected to fill this role and humbled to serve in the company of my 11 distinguished predecessors.  

In light of the stellar leadership of past-EIC Sandra Mathison and her predecessors, I have big editorial shoes to fill. Fortunately, I have recruited an editorial board of distinguished members who will help me maintain the journal's quality of scholarship. Lois-ellin Datta and J. Bradley Cousins have agreed to assist me (in largely consultative roles) as associate editors. In addition to reviewing proposals and issues, I am reviewing and, when necessary, revising the online documents about the journal and have inaugurated the use of an online submission site.

 

Over the years, NDE has served well its purposes to provide a compendium of evaluation sourcebooks and to serve as a venue for consolidating the results of scholarship about new or emerging evaluation topics. Issues that are in the pipeline for 2013 will address performance management and measurement, data visualization, and mixed methods. The issues will represent the breadth of topics that is typical for NDE and will profile the work of evaluators both within and outside of the United States. As the guest editors will say in their introductory notes in the Spring 2013 issue on performance measurement and management, the contributing authors will "analyze different ways in which evaluation and performance measurement relate to one another in a wide range of contexts where performance management is being used within different nations, cultures and organizations-all with differing rationales and orientations." The data visualization issue will discuss the role and practice of data visualization, provide in-depth looks at both qualitative and quantitative data visualization (including multiple examples), and discuss future directions. The mixed methods issue will deal with long-standing methodological and philosophical topics, with a focus on the credibility of evidence in evaluation. The fourth issue for the year has yet to be determined.

Currently, I am somewhat concerned about the number of proposals and issues in the pipeline and about the pace of proposal development. I intend to actively recruit NDE volumes on topics that have not been covered recently or at all. Several possible topics for future issues were suggested in a Thought Leaders session that I led late last summer, and several guest editors have come forward with new ideas. I am particularly interested in hearing from non-American evaluators and will be happy to work with them to develop proposals.

NDE issues, in essence, are small edited books. Admittedly, preparing them is not a small endeavor. However, distribution to all AEA members is assured, and the ensuing breadth of readership is likely to be as great or greater than when publishing a standalone book. I urge AEA members to contact me with additional ideas for journal issues!

Go to the New Directions for Evaluation Web Page

The evaluation world mourns the recent loss of Carol Weiss, an award-winning graduate of Cornell University and Columbia University who espoused a scientific approach to evaluation, conducted groundbreaking studies that explored the use of social research in public policy, and who was critical in the emergence of the field of research utilization. Weiss died on Jan. 8 at the age of 86 and news of her death spread quickly and drew an intense reaction from the evaluation community. Multiple memorials were posted on EVALTALK; former AEA President Leslie Cooksy's opening remarks launching the January Thought Leaders discussion forum paid tribute to her; and the upcoming September issue of the American Journal of Evaluation will honor her as well.

 

Weiss was the 1980 recipient of AEA's Alva and Gunnar Myrdal Science Award and she was also recognized widely for influencing the use of evaluation more broadly both within U.S. government as well as globally. She retired in 2006 and had served as a docent at the Boston Museum of Science.

 

"Evaluation lost one of its great pioneers when Carol Weiss passed away," noted Michael Quinn Patton in the EVALTALK listserv discussion board. "She provided my first publishing opportunity when, after hearing of a conference presentation I did, she invited me to write a chapter for her edited Knowledge Use book in the late 1970's. She put the issue of evaluation use at the center of evaluation practice and theory. Her theoretical and empirical contributions to the field endure. Dialogues, discussions and, yes, debates, with Carol Weiss over the years have had an enormous impact on the field in general and my own work in particular. We became not only colleagues, but allies in supporting use and opposing misuse."

 

Bill Fear recalled meeting Weiss at a conference. "I think she brought something to the table that many of us find uncomfortable," he shared on EVALTALK. "This quality was the willingness to advocate the questioning of our own, and others', inherent assumptions and to surface and test these assumptions rigorously."

 

Former AEA President Debra Rog said this: "One of the warmest memories I have of Carol is having her as a guest speaker at a conference of a small group (no longer operating), called the Knowledge Utilization Society. I will never forget her eloquence and scholarship, as well as the way she could inspire us to be better. One of the parts of her talk that I will always remember (and repeat often!) is when she spoke about an individual who made the most of his life - someone who was a physician, founded a medical school, and was a scientist (among other things). During his retirement, he worked on a book that was first published at age 73 and which he worked on until his death at 91. This person was Peter Roget, creator of Roget's Thesaurus. It was a great reminder that we can accomplish great things throughout our lives. It was a beautiful tribute to him, and I look forward to our doing the same for Carol over the course of this session and others to come."

The American Evaluation Association's mission is to:

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