Page 132 - DLIS406_ACADEMIC_LIBRARY_SYSTEM

Unit 12: Academic Library

Having said this, evaluation has been defined as: Notes
• A systematic, rigorous, and meticulous application of scientific methods to assess the
design, implementation, improvement or outcomes of a program. It is a resource-intensive
process, frequently requiring resources, such as, evaluator expertise, labour, time and a
sizeable budget.
• ‘The critical assessment, in as objective a manner as possible, of the degree to which a
service or its component parts fulfils stated goals’ (St Leger and Walsworth-Bell). The
focus of this definition is on attaining objective knowledge, and scientifically or quantitatively
measuring predetermined and external concepts.
• ‘A study designed to assist some audience to assess an object’s merit and worth’ (Shufflebeam).
In this definition the focus is on facts as well as value laden judgements of the programs
outcomes and worth.

Purpose

The main purpose of a program evaluation can be to “determine the quality of a program by
formulating a judgment” Stake and Schwandt (2006).

An alternative view is that “projects, evaluators and other stakeholders (including funders)
will all have potentially different ideas about how best to evaluate a project since each may
have a different definition of ‘merit’. The core of the problem is thus about defining what is
of value.” From this perspective, evaluation “is a contested term”, as “evaluators” use the
term evaluation to describe an assessment, or investigation of a program whilst others simply
understand evaluation as being synonymous with applied research.

Not all evaluations serve the same purpose some evaluations serve a monitoring function
rather than focusing solely on measurable program outcomes or evaluation findings and a full
list of types of evaluations would be difficult to compile. This is because evaluation is not part
of a unified theoretical framework, drawing on a number of disciplines, which include management
and organizational theory, policy analysis, education, sociology, social anthropology, and social
change.

Discussion

Within the last three decades there have been tremendous theoretical and methodological
developments within the field of evaluation. Despite its progress, there are still many fundamental
problems faced by this field as “unlike medicine, evaluation is not a discipline that has been
developed by practicing professionals over thousands of years, so we are not yet at the stage
where we have huge encyclopaedias that will walk us through any evaluation step-by-step”,
or provide a clear definition of what evaluation entails (Davidson, 2005). It could therefore be
argued that a key problem that evaluators face is the lack of a clear definition of evaluation,
which may “underline why program evaluation is periodically called into question as an
original process, whose primary function is the production of legitimate and justified judgments
which serve as the bases for relevant recommendations.” However, the strict adherence to a
set of methodological assumptions may make the field of evaluation more acceptable to a
mainstream audience but this adherence will work towards preventing evaluators from developing
new strategies for dealing with the myriad problems that programs face.
It is claimed that only a minority of evaluation reports are used by the evaluand (client)
(Datta, 2006). One justification of this is that “when evaluation findings are challenged or
utilization has failed, it was because stakeholders and clients found the inferences weak or the

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