Evaluation: Noble Profession and Pedestrian Practice

Abstract

Its basic conception excludes crucial paradigms of evaluation: for example, the evaluation by historians of Napoleon's tactics at Waterloo. I take a noneducational case, for interest, but there can of course be educational ones too; suppose you are evaluating the school system in Athens. It seems clear that this is logically the same kind of enterprise as evaluating the tactics of a field general or contemporary educational activities. But the latter can easily and the former cannot usually be subsumed under the PDK (ex-CIPP) definition, which requires that evaluation be "data gathering for future decision making."