Bridging Evaluation Theory and Practice: The Contributions of John Mayne to Canadian Federal Evaluation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper provides a thematic review of Mayne’s contributions to Canadian federal evaluation in order to describe his influence on how the function has evolved over the past 40 years. Key themes explored in the paper include Mayne’s influence on the development of a results-based culture in federal departments and agencies, as well as his conceptual grounding of evaluation activities through theory-based evaluation approaches and, most notably, Contribution Analysis. We draw on government publications to link policy directions to Mayne’s work and we provide a prospective view on his continued influence on the function for years to come.
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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 | 0.076 | 0.135 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".