Evaluation Lives

I've been reading everything I could find by Truman Madsen, my Philosophy 110 professor from 1971. As I've listened to his talks about insights from Joseph Smith I've realized that these fundamentals have driven much of my interest in the foundations for evaluation over the last 45+ years. But, unfortunately, I just discovered his Eternal Man (1966) book which summarizes these fundamentals and connects them to the philosophers I've tried to understand over this time in just 80 pages! I wish I had studied and assigned this book to all my evaluation students over the years. It would have helped me explain my views and why I think of evaluation as I do so much better than I was able to explain them myself. The brief review of the book by Chauncey Riddle from volume 8 (1968) of BYU Studies copied below and Chapter 1 of Madsen's book provide an outline of issues that give me the great hope that all people can be much better evaluators than most evaluation writers gi...

This article illustrates how important some evaluations can be and the fact that they are best made with a combination of rationality AND intuition, gut, feelings and other components that aren't always perceived as being rational. The role of rationality in evaluation came up in many of my interviews.  The following quotes from an interview with Chauncey Riddle, a professor emeritus of philosophy at BYU illustrates some of the issues, which I summarize this way: Most people believe evaluations should be rational but in practice, they go with their feelings, hunches, the Spirit, their conscience, the Light of Christ and/or other inclinations that don't always appear to be rational. R: Well, I've learned that yes, that you can't evaluate without real help from the Spirit. But if you use your own judgment solely, you're very error-prone. DDW: Even if you're trying to be righteous and... R: Even if you're trying to do what's right. And the only ...

The following quote from a professional (who wants to remain anonymous) I interviewed illustrates how most people I've talked to deal with their parents' or other significant others' values and evaluations (both embracing and modifying or rejecting them) while figuring out their own. What I think about when I think about evaluation, what first comes to my mind, is grades. I grew up thinking about “how do people evaluate me and value the products I produce?” And I think about it very personally. This may be more personal than you want or than you could share or write about. But I can remember my mother saying to me, “Never let it be said of you, as Alma had to say of his son Corianton going after the harlot Isabel, ‘because of your actions they would not believe my words.’” My grandfather was [in the public eye] at the time and she would say, “Never let it be said of you that because of your actions they would not believe grandfather’s words.” She never intended this, but it...

May 21, 2013 Thoughts on this project and how to tailor it based on what I've been learning so far. As I’ve been thinking about this project since participating in class last night, I’ve had several thoughts. I want to get a copy of and review the audio recording that Melissa made from class (my recorder didn’t work) because I agree with her that a lot was said about what I could do with my final chapter in terms of exploring themes I see across the cases and anticipating what readers might do with these stories and themes in moving the field of evaluation forward, particularly in their own practices.  The students also encouraged me to give more thought to sharing my own journey in bringing these pioneers’ stories to light. I want to do some of that but feel hesitant about doing so for a couple of reasons-  1. I am pretty much in awe of these people and don’t want to be taking anything away from their stories by taking up space with mine, and  2. I feel that my ...

DDW Fieldnotes, 2/3/2012—Insight into Informal Evaluation So, I had a real breakthrough today while swimming and spent awhile after swimming writing it down. Here is what I wrote on the iPad sitting in the locker room before going to the bike to read more in evaluation journals— Most professional evaluators assume other stakeholders are poor evaluators. (cite Stufflebeam, Fetterman, Scriven, others) Similarly, most teachers believe they know more than their students. What do evaluators do about this? Fetterman tries to help people do their own evaluations better. So does Patton in his own way. Others (Scriven and many traditionalists) call for better education with evaluation as a transdiscipline everyone should learn to do better but they focus mostly on helping professional evaluators do better evaluations for everyone. Do we really know people are poor evaluators? Where are the phenomenologies or case studies or even serious narratives of people’s evaluation lives? Where are ...

DDW Fieldnotes 9/23/2011—Research and Project Ideas Recorded 9/23/2011 and transcription finished 9/26/2011 Research Framework.amr File DDW: Okay, I’m walking along thinking here. I want to talk about my research project ideas. Yesterday I got working on analyzing some of the stories from Terkel’s “Working” book. And they’re so rich and full of evaluation. So I wanted to start sorting out some of what I’ve got. 1. First, I have sources of lived evaluation stories from “working”, from all the other books Studs Terkel has written and that other people like him have done, including most biographies. Which would include ethnographies and  phenomenologies (like the ones by Max VanManen and his students at http://www.phenomenologyonline.com/sources/ , (1min) journal articles, stories, others. There’s an endless stream of those. 2. I also have my own case studies that I’m conducting with people. And one thing I’ve struggled with those is to know how deep I should take them...