Socializing Emerging Evaluators: The Use of Mentoring to Develop Evaluation Competence

Abstract

AbstractThe interdisciplinary nature of evaluation necessitates that emerging evaluators, those within the first five years in the evaluation profession, operate competently within the profession, and receive an extensive and deliberate socialization to the field. Mentoring is a key component to integrating these new evaluators into the field and one way that socialization takes place. In this chapter, survey data from GEDI participants are used to describe how the Graduate Education Diversity Internship (GEDI) program influences the socialization of diverse emerging scholars, specifically using mentoring relationships to facilitate the development of evaluation competence. Survey data exploring the interns’ formal and informal mentoring relationships suggest that informal mentoring relationships were more effective and yield more support for psychosocial development and exposure to evaluation‐related knowledge and competence in comparison with formal mentoring relationships.