Full Description
With his 1973 address titled "Program Evaluation, Particularly Responsive Evaluation," Robert Stake offered a new vision and rationale for educational and social program evaluation. In this vision, evaluation was reframed from the application of sophisticated analytic techniques that address distant policymakers' questions: of program benefits and effectiveness "on the average" to an engagement with on-site practitioners, about the quality and meaning of their practice. These innovative ideas helped accelerate a transformation of the evaluation enterprise into its current pluralistic character, within which remain multiple and varied legacies of key responsive evaluation principles. This volume offers some of those legacies, representing central epistemological, artistic, and political dimensions of Stake's original commitment to responsiveness. This is the 92nd issue of the Jossey-Bass series "New Directions for Evaluation".
Contents
EDITORS' NOTES 1Jennifer C. Greene, Tineke A. Abma1. Stake's Responsive Evaluation: Core Ideas and Evolution7Tineke A. Abma, Robert E. StakeFrom interview and text excerpts, the core ideas of Stake'sresponsive evaluation are presented, as originally framed and intheir evolution over time.2. Responsive Evaluation (and Its Influence on DeliberativeDemocratic Evaluation) 23Ernest R. HouseThe important contributions of responsive evaluation's orientationto local issues and qualitative methods are highlighted, but alsotempered by a rejection of responsive evaluation's relativity infavor of deliberation as a vehicle for adjudicating among competingevaluative claims.3. Nobody Knows My Name: In Praise of African AmericanEvaluators Who Were Responsive 31Stafford HoodA historical accounting of the work of early African Americaneducational evaluators demonstrates the critical place of race andculture in both historical and contemporary visions of responsiveevaluation.4. Becoming Responsive?and Some Consequences forEvaluation as Dialogue Across Distance 45Yoland WadsworthA vision of responsiveness as the political inclusion ofmarginalized human service providers and end users is offeredthrough the author's critical and sustained efforts to enact thisvision in practice.5. The Changing Face of Responsive Evaluation: A PostmodernRejoinder 59Ian StronachThe meanings of responsive evaluation are deconstructed, yieldingnumerous tensions within the theory?tensions interpreted asspaces for ongoing reinventions of creative practice.6. Responsiveness and Everyday Life 73Thomas A. SchwandtResponsiveness is connected to our everyday ways of making sense ofthe value of programs, and thus to a vision of evaluation asindeterminate yet morally engaged with the textures and contours ofwise practice.7. Responsive Evaluation Is to Personalized Assessment . . .89Linda MabryParallels are drawn between personalized assessment of studentlearning and responsive evaluation of educational programs. Theparallels are conceptual, epistemological, methodological, andideological.INDEX 103
