Evaluative thinking is at the heart of evaluation, yet it’s remarkably challenging to do in practice. To help strengthen those evaluative neural pathways, we offer some questions to aid you in developing your evaluative thinking skills. To begin, let’s first look at this odd concept of ‘evaluative thinking’. Tom Grayson’s recent post on the AEA …
Is the above tree alive and growing or dead and ready to be made into furniture? How does something like a tree connect to providing a swing, becoming a coffee table, or supporting the structure of a home? That is based partly on a theory of change about how a tree does what it does. …
What good is a program evaluation if its findings aren’t used? Not much. Even as an accountability mechanism, evaluations have the potential to demonstrate the impact a program is having in the world and reveal new insights to guide strategy in ways that few other things can. Although there are many ways to convey evaluation …
One of the tools within the toolkit of a developmental evaluator is mindfulness. Mindfulness is a disciplined, regular, and persistent means of paying attention to what is going on. It is a terrific means of collecting data on regular activities, particularly in complex environments where it may be unclear what is worth paying attention to. …
