Evaluation Literacy and Use in Community Organizations: Insights and Implications for Evaluation Capacity Building
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Past research on evaluation capacity in community organizations has focused on their capacity to conduct rather than use evaluation. This study sought to address this gap by exploring evaluation use and the supporting processes, systems, and structures in the community sector. The authors administered an online survey to 102 individuals working or involved in community organizations to measure their perceptions of their organization’s capacity to use evaluation. The survey was based on an adaptation of Bourgeois and Cousins’ evaluation capacity framework and a related assessment tool, the Organizational Evaluation Capacity Assessment Instrument, for the community sector context. Their findings offer empirical insights into three critical dimensions of the adapted framework associated with evaluation use in community organizations: evaluation literacy, organizational decision-making, and learning benefits. This exploratory study generated several key findings, including the need for tools and policies that establish a strong link between evaluation and decision-making, expanding the scope of engagement in data interpretation beyond primary users, and extending the dissemination of findings to external stakeholders. Implications for practice and research are discussed.
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.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| gpt | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | high |
| grok | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | high |
| opus | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | medium |
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 | 0.046 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 3 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".