Methodological and Conceptual Challenges in Studying Evaluation Process Use
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This article discusses methodological and conceptual challenges in empirically studying process use. The main difficulty lies in disentangling cause (here the evaluation process) and effects (here indicators of process use). The evaluation researcher not only needs to take into account all relevant factors regarding the evaluator, the participants, the evaluation context, and the evaluation approach and implementation, but also needs to base the research on a valid operationalization of process use. The article was inspired by the author’s experiences in conducting an exploratory study of process use in the context of two expert-facilitated self-evaluation projects involving five program staff. Before larger-scale studies can establish more generalizable knowledge on process use, evaluation researchers should engage in high-quality, real-time, in-depth qualitative studies to better understand the complex interactions at play and to help build a solid operationalization of this relevant construct.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Theoretical or conceptual | medium |
| gpt | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Methods About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Theoretical or conceptual | low |
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 | 0.514 | 0.646 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.025 |
| Open science | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| 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, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
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".