UCDT Evaluation Philosophy

Evaluation Team Philosophy

Formative Approach

The UCDT implementation plan called for the evaluation team to work closely with the curriculum development team to create a meaningful evaluation plan. The development of the evaluation plan was guided by four major principles. First, a formative prospective dominated evaluation activities and was used to identify and to develop relevant indicators for improving UCDT activities. Second, to ensure that these efforts are maximally useful information, evaluation became an integral part of UCDT activities rather than last-minute add-ons. Third, given the broad scope of UCDT goals and activities, the evaluation team used multiple approaches to understanding UCDT's impact on macro (institutional) and micro (individual) outcomes within a diverse educational community. Finally, every effort was made to use (adapt) existing sources of evaluation data (for example, the student-ratings of instructor effectiveness provided by U of M's Center for Research on Learning and Teaching) to collect data.

The evaluation team encouraged the curriculum development group to help create the evaluation plan. Nevertheless, to ensure an objective evaluation, the evaluation plan was carried out independently by the evaluation team. That is to say, the evaluation team deployed the instruments and analyzed the data.

The stakeholders of the evaluation include NSF, the curriculum development group, and the U of M's central administration. The evaluation team has incorporated what it perceives to be the primary interest of these stakeholders into the evaluation plan.

Participatory Evaluation

The evaluation team adopted a participatory evaluation approach. Cousins & Earl (1992) contend that participatory evaluation is marked by the intention of the evaluators to build evaluation capacity among the stakeholders (in this case, the curriculum developers). Evaluation capacity will help these stakeholders to develop operationalized objectives, evaluation plans, instruments, and data analysis skills. These skills will continue to serve the project by instilling in the stakeholders the values, knowledge, skills, and techniques needed to conduct evaluation even after the evaluators are no longer assigned to the project. Evaluation building activities were carried out informally. Through out the course of the project, the evaluation team made a point to explicate the evaluation activities and progress.