The Nature of Evaluation Part I: Relation to Psychology.

Abstract

The discipline of evaluation is devoted to the systematic determination of merit, worth, or significance. It is divided into fields according to the type of entity evaluated—for example, program evaluation, or personnel evaluation—and there are more than twenty of these recognized fields of evaluation. Some specific aspects of evaluation methodology have been developed to solve problems of evaluation in only one or a few of these fields (e.g., bias control in panel selection, systematic side-effect identification in program evaluation, road-testing techniques in product evaluation). However, the underlying logic of the process of evaluation—for example, the difference between merit and worth, or between grading and ranking—and a substantial portion of its general methodology (e.g., techniques of measurement, causality determination, applying the requirement of informed consent) are shared across all or many of these fields. Many of these general techniques (the ‘general methodology’) come from the applied social sciences, and are learnt by students in the normal course of education in those fields. But the logic of evaluation has been developed for and applies only to evaluation; and the field-specific methodologies of evaluation must also be mastered in order to deal with evaluation in the fields to which they apply. Teaching evaluation therefore focuses on these evaluation-specific topics, the general logic and the special methodologies.