Transactional evaluation: assessing human interactions during program development

Evaluation in educational R&D programs seems to wear many hats. There is the goal-free approach of Scriven (1974), responsive evaluation of Stake (1967) and Evers (1975), standard goal-based evaluation techniques (summarized by Stufflebeam, et al., 1971), etc. All of these evaluation techniques or models have one attribute in common. They all focus on the object of the innovation, whether it be change in process of learning by the student, or attaining of mastery of new objectives, or affective movement, etc. What seems to be missing from these approaches to evaluation of programs, and what transactional evaluation seems to provide an answer to--is a focus on the inter-personal effects of the perceptions of project team members and the people in the surrounding environment where the implementation or experimentation is taking place (see for example, Seidel, et al., 1974; Hunter, et al., 1975).