Why a Special Issue of Practice Notes about How to Teach Evaluation?: Introducing This Special Issue of The <i>Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the fi eld of evaluation there have long been tensions between the ideas of evaluation as a transactional practice and evaluation as an aspirational practice intrinsically related to questions of worth, purpose, and value.While one of the hallmarks of contemporary evaluation remains its practical, problem-solving orientation, evaluation is not simply the technical application of inquiry methods to address "real world" problems ( Fitzpatrick et al., 2009 ;Preskill, 2000 ;Schwandt, 2008 ;Shadish et al., 1991 ).It is also a highly contextualized socio-political process involving a signifi cant, orchestrated interplay between theory and practice, mediated by dialogue and by refl ective practice, and its successful practice requires evaluators to engage with constraints, pressures, opportunities, ambiguities, and uncertainties (Chouinard et al., 2017 ).Evaluation practice is further informed by a constellation of theories and conceptual models from diverse disciplines, by its contexts of practice, and by the evaluator's moral/political stance and commitment ( Schwandt, 2008 ;House, 2015 ).Complicating matters further, some have suggested that teaching and learning are implicitly a part of contemporary evaluation practice.Patton (2017 ), for example, called learning through an evaluation process a "pedagogy of evaluation, " positing that evaluators and stakeholders alike develop new ideas and new ways of being and acting in the world ( Widdershoven, 2001 ) because of their participation in the evaluation itself.LaVelle et al. (2020 ) critiqued Patton's description of a pedagogy of evaluation as incomplete, suggesting that pedagogy is a planned, systematic process that guides an educator's decisions about when, where, and how to teach.In this case, a pedagogy of evaluation would be understood to describe where and how to teach evaluative principles and processes.Th e intentional teaching of evaluation to novice or would-be users of evaluation remains an ongoing challenge.As teachers of evaluation, or evaluator educators, we must help our students develop the technical and artistic aspects of
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.050 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.035 | 0.012 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".