Evaluation, Culture, and Learning: An Overview

Evaluation can be a complicated process, but the core idea is simple. We wish to look carefully at an activity to determine the extent to which it has been performed in a satisfactory way (in terms of meeting desired objectives), and therefore to decide whether to continue on a current path or make changes. The distinction is often drawn between evaluation and appraisal, although they overlap at the margins. The former is normally reserved for activities already being undertaken, whereas the latter involves the rating of options for future behaviour, none of which has yet been applied in the context of interest to the decision maker. There is more reason to distinguish between evaluation and planning, in that the former interprets previous decisions and the latter makes decisions about future events. Even so, it usually makes sense to undertake them together. An activity may be ongoing, in which case the evaluation can be termed formative or developmental. For example, there may be reason to evaluate a clinical budget management process, which was activated five years ago and will continue indefinitely in one form or another. In contrast, an activity might have been initiated on a trial basis, in which case evaluation may be termed summative or experimental. For example, two approaches to the provision of a new service might have been tested for three months, and the aim is to decide whether one or the other (or indeed neither) should become a routine feature of service delivery. Formative evaluation is more likely to be conducted by people who are directly involved in the activity itself, whereas summative evaluation tends to involve external evaluators. The use of external evaluators may increase impartiality, credibility, and technical skills. However, it will probably be more expensive, and might carry more risks in terms of the evaluators' competence and knowledge of the activity to be evaluated. The evaluation process may take many forms. At one extreme, it might consist of a highly formal and complicated experimental design involving the capture of data for several years. At the other extreme, it may be no more than a meeting of key parties at which their largely subjective views can be aggregated. Most people are (or should be) continually thinking and talking about possible revisions to their work. It follows that informal processes may have greater importance in some re-