Marvin C. Alkin (born 1934) is an American professor. He is Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Alkin joined the UCLA faculty in 1964 after receiving his doctorate from the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. He has, at various times, served as Chair of the Education Department and Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. He was founder and former Director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Evaluation.
Alkin has received multiple awards from the American Educational Research Association (AERA) for outstanding evaluation reports and policy studies. In addition, he is one of only four people to receive both of the major scholarly awards of the American Evaluation Association (AEA). In 1996, he was the winner of the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award for Lifelong Contributions to Evaluation Theory from AEA. In 2016, he received the Association’s Research on Evaluation Award for significant contributions to the study of evaluation.
Alkin has been editor or associate editor of eight academic journals, including the Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis Journal, Evaluation Review, and Studies in Educational Evaluation. He also was executive editor of the Encyclopedia of Educational Research (6th Edition). He is currently co-editor of SAGE Publication’s Evaluation in Practice Series.
Alkin has been a consultant to numerous national governments and has directed program evaluations in 18 different countries. He is especially noted for his extensive research on evaluation utilization and comparative evaluation theory. His resume includes well over 150 published books, articles and chapters.
Alkin is noted for his work on Context Sensitive Evaluation, an approach derived from an understanding of factors found in the research literature that are associated with high levels of evaluation use.
Action research is a philosophy and methodology of research generally applied in the social sciences. It seeks transformative change through the simultaneous process of taking action and doing research, which are linked together by critical reflection. Kurt Lewin, then a professor at MIT, first coined the term "action research" in 1944. In his 1946 paper "Action Research and Minority Problems" he described action research as "a comparative research on the conditions and effects of various forms of social action and research leading to social action" that uses "a spiral of steps, each of which is composed of a circle of planning, action and fact-finding about the result of the action".
Participant observation is one type of data collection method by practitioner-scholars typically used in qualitative research and ethnography. This type of methodology is employed in many disciplines, particularly anthropology, sociology, communication studies, human geography, and social psychology. Its aim is to gain a close and intimate familiarity with a given group of individuals and their practices through an intensive involvement with people in their cultural environment, usually over an extended period of time.
Qualitative research is a type of research that aims to gather and analyse non-numerical (descriptive) data in order to gain an understanding of individuals' social reality, including understanding their attitudes, beliefs, and motivation. This type of research typically involves in-depth interviews, focus groups, or observations in order to collect data that is rich in detail and context. Qualitative research is often used to explore complex phenomena or to gain insight into people's experiences and perspectives on a particular topic. It is particularly useful when researchers want to understand the meaning that people attach to their experiences or when they want to uncover the underlying reasons for people's behavior. Qualitative methods include ethnography, grounded theory, discourse analysis, and interpretative phenomenological analysis. Qualitative research methods have been used in sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, communication studies, social work, folklore, educational research, information science and software engineering research.
Educational research refers to the systematic collection and analysis of data related to the field of education. Research may involve a variety of methods and various aspects of education including student learning, interaction, teaching methods, teacher training, and classroom dynamics.
Gene V Glass is an American statistician and researcher working in educational psychology and the social sciences. According to the science writer Morton Hunt, he coined the term "meta-analysis" and illustrated its first use in his presidential address to the American Educational Research Association in San Francisco in April, 1976. The most extensive illustration of the technique was to the literature on psychotherapy outcome studies, published in 1980 by Johns Hopkins University Press under the title Benefits of Psychotherapy by Mary Lee Smith, Gene V Glass, and Thomas I. Miller. Gene V Glass is a Regents' Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University in both the educational leadership and policy studies and psychology in education divisions, having retired in 2010 from the Mary Lou Fulton Institute and Graduate School of Education. From 2011 to 2020, he was a senior researcher at the National Education Policy Center, a Research Professor in the School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder, and a Lecturer in the Connie L. Lurie College of Education at San Jose State University. In 2003, he was elected to membership in the National Academy of Education.
Narrative inquiry or narrative analysis emerged as a discipline from within the broader field of qualitative research in the early 20th century, as evidence exists that this method was used in psychology and sociology. Narrative inquiry uses field texts, such as stories, autobiography, journals, field notes, letters, conversations, interviews, family stories, photos, and life experience, as the units of analysis to research and understand the way people create meaning in their lives as narratives.
Michael John Scriven was a British-born Australian polymath and academic philosopher, best known for his contributions to the theory and practice of evaluation.
The National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) is a research partnership consisting of UCLA, the University of Colorado, Stanford University, RAND, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Southern California, Educational Testing Service, and the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Stephen Webb Raudenbush is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Sociology and Chairman of the Committee on Education at the University of Chicago. He is best known for his development and application of hierarchical linear models (HLM) in the field of education but he has also published on other subjects such as health and crime. Hierarchical linear models, which go by many other names, are used to study many natural processes. To use an example from education, a three level hierarchical model might account for the fact that students are nested in classrooms which are nested in schools. With the right data one could go further and note that schools are nested in districts which are nested in states. Repeated measures of the same individuals can be studied with these models as observations nested in people.
Stewart I. Donaldson is a British-born American positive psychologist specializing in health, well-being, and evaluation science. He is a distinguished university professor at Claremont Graduate University and is the director of the Claremont Evaluation Center and The Evaluators' Institute. He also served as dean at Claremont for 16 years (2001-2017) and as president of the American Evaluation Association in 2015.
Dale Berger is a professor of Psychology, Emeritus, and former Dean of the School of Behavioral and Organizational Sciences (SBOS), Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. Berger is a cognitive psychologist and research methodologist with a focus on the use of technology in support of teaching and learning statistics.
Ellen A. Wartella is a leading scholar of the role of media in children's development. She is the chair and professor of communication, director of Northwestern University's Center on Media and Human Development, and an adviser for the review at Northwestern University. She studies social policy, media studies, psychology, and child development at the University. She believes that smartphones are disruptive in a way that's different from earlier technology.
The American Evaluation Association (AEA) is a professional association for evaluators and those with a professional interest in the field of evaluation, including practitioners, faculty, students, funders, managers, and government decision-makers. As of 2014, AEA has approximately 7057 members from all 50 US states and over 60 other countries.
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering all aspects of educational policy analysis. It was established in 1979 and is published by SAGE Publications on behalf of the American Educational Research Association. The editors are Geoffrey Borman, A. Brooks Bowden, Deven Carlson, Amanda Datnow, and Sylvia Hurtado.
Empowerment evaluation (EE) is an evaluation approach designed to help communities monitor and evaluate their own performance. It is used in comprehensive community initiatives as well as small-scale settings and is designed to help groups accomplish their goals. According to David Fetterman, "Empowerment evaluation is the use of evaluation concepts, techniques, and findings to foster improvement and self-determination". An expanded definition is: "Empowerment evaluation is an evaluation approach that aims to increase the likelihood that programs will achieve results by increasing the capacity of program stakeholders to plan, implement, and evaluate their own programs."
Jean J. Schensul is a medical anthropologist and senior scientist at The Institute for Community Research, in Hartford, Connecticut. Dr. Schensul is most notable for her research on HIV/AIDS prevention and other health-related research in the United States, as well as her extensive writing on ethnographic research methods. She has made notable contributions to the field of applied anthropology, with her work on structural interventions to health disparities leading to the development of new organizations, community research partnerships, and community/university associations. Schensul’s work has been dedicated to community-based research on topics such as senior health, education, and substance abuse, among others.
Goal-free evaluation is any evaluation in which the evaluator conducts the evaluation without particular knowledge of or reference to stated or predetermined goals and objectives. This external evaluation model typically consists of an independent evaluator who is intentionally screened from the program's stated goals and objectives in hopes of reducing potential goal-related tunnel vision. According to Scriven, the logic behind avoiding stated goals and objectives has to do with "finding out what the program is actually doing without being cued as to what it is trying to do. If the program is achieving its stated goals and objectives, then these achievements should show up; if not, it is argued, they are irrelevant". The goal-free evaluator attempts to observe and measure all actual outcomes, effects, or impacts, intended or unintended, all without being cued to the program's intentions. As Popham analogizes, “As you can learn from any baseball pitcher who has set out in the first inning to pitch a shutout, the game’s final score is the thing that counts, not good intentions.”
Christian van Nieuwerburgh (1971) is a British-based executive coach, academic, consultant and author. He is a Professor of Coaching and Positive Psychology at the University of East London (UEL) and Executive Director of Growth Coaching International, a Sydney-based global coach training provider for the education sector.
Marcia Guttentag was clinical social psychologist whose work focused on psychological issues related to children, poverty, women's rights, and mental health. As one of the founders of the Evaluation Research Society, Guttentag is known for being a pioneer in promoting evaluation research as a distinct field of social science. She was an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Huey-tsyh Chen is a Taiwanese American sociologist and scholar of program evaluation. He is Professor in the Department of Public Health and Director of the Center for Evaluation and Applied Research at Mercer University.
