Enduring Themes in John Mayne’s Work: Implications for Evaluation Practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper focuses on three enduring themes in John Mayne’s work. They are causality; balancing learning and accountability as meta-objectives for evaluations; and program complexity. These themes are all central in his development and elaboration of contribution analysis. Although his work was aimed at practitioners, over time, the sophistication of his approach to evaluation raises challenges for practitioners, particularly given the structure of the evaluation field. The paper concludes with a suggestion to make contribution analysis more accessible, taking advantage of the work done by contributors to the Checklist Project at the University of Western Michigan.
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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 | 0.338 | 0.366 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.081 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.031 | 0.037 |
| Open science | 0.008 | 0.019 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.025 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".