Jean A. King is a professor in the Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development at the University of Minnesota. She holds an M.S. and Ph.D. from Cornell University and, prior to her graduate study, taught middle school English in upstate New York before moving to New Orleans, LA where she was on the faculty at Tulane University. In 1989 she moved upriver to the University of Minnesota as the founding director of the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement (CAREI) in the College of Education and Human Development, a position she held for four years before working collaboratively to revitalize program evaluation instruction in the College. King founded the Minnesota Evaluation Studies Institute (MESI) in1996 and currently serves as its director. With over thirty years’ experience teaching and conducting evaluations, Professor King has received numerous awards for her work, including the Myrdal Award for Evaluation Practice and the Ingle Award for Extraordinary Service from the American Evaluation Association, three teaching awards, and three community service awards. A sought-after presenter and long-time writer on evaluation, she is the author of numerous articles, chapters, and reviews and retains an abiding interest in participatory evaluation and evaluation capacity building.
You've taken your introduction to evaluation course and are about to do your first evaluation project. Where do you begin? This book helps bridge the gap between the theory of evaluation and its practice, giving students the specific skills they need to use in different evaluation settings. The authors present readers with three organizing frameworks (derived from social interdependence theory from social psychology, evaluation use research, and the evaluation capacity building literature) for thinking about evaluation practice. These frameworks help readers track the various skills or strategies to use for distinctive evaluation situations. In addition, the authors provide explicit advice about how to solve specific evaluation problems. Numerous examples throughout the text bring interactive practice to life in a variety of settings.
