Utilization Focused Developmental Evaluation: Learning Through Practice
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Utilization-focused evaluation provides an overall decision-making framework with the intention of ensuring evaluation products and processes are actually used. Developmental evaluation provides a structure to learn from an experiment or pilot in the making and provide feedback to course-correct and improve the ongoing effort. In this paper we report on a project where we combined both into a utilization-focused developmental evaluation (UFDE). Purpose: To determine the theoretical complementarities and the practical advantages of combining UFE with DE, by reflecting on a practical experience. We include a synopsis of the methodology along with a sample of findings, followed by a reflection of the overall process. We emphasize the conditions that enabled this experience to evolve to guide other practitioners interested in this learning approach to evaluation. Setting: The context was the piloting of a social and financial education curriculum for youth called Aflateen that was developed by Aflatoun Child Savings International in Amsterdam and test-driven by over forty partners around the World. Intervention: The evaluation experience took place during a ten-month period between December 2012 and October 2013. This paper provides a summary of the context and a justification for the approach. Research Design: Not applicable. Data Collection and Analysis: In additional to conventional data collection instruments, we applied participatory inquiry tools from Social Analysis Systems (www.sas2.net) as a means of engaging stakeholders in real-time data collection and analysis. Findings: Examples are provided to demonstrate how some developmental evaluation findings informed organizational strategic and operational decisions during the life of the evaluation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.075 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it