Topic summary
Evaluate
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Evaluation.
Purpose
The main purpose of a program evaluation can be to "determine the quality of a program by formulating a judgment" Marthe Hurteau, Sylvain Houle, Stéphanie Mongiat (2009). An alternative view is that "projects, evaluators, and other stakeholders (including funders) will all have potentially different ideas about how best to evaluate a project since each may have a different definition of 'merit'. The core of the problem is thus about defining what is of value." From this perspective, evaluation "is a contested term", as "evaluators" use the term evaluation to describe an assessment, or investigation of a program whilst others simply understand evaluation as being synonymous with applied research.