definition of evaluation by different authors

Assessment refers to the process of collecting information that reflects the performance of a student, school, classroom, or an academic system based on a set of standards, learning criteria, or curricula. What indicators, evidence, and impacts need to be captured within developing systems? For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription. The first category includes approaches that promote invalid or incomplete findings (referred to as pseudoevaluations), while the other three include approaches that agree, more or less, with the definition (i.e., Questions and/or Methods- Assessment is the collection of relevant information that may be relied on for making decisions., 3. To demonstrate to government, stakeholders, and the wider public the value of research. Such a framework should be not linear but recursive, including elements from contextual environments that influence and/or interact with various aspects of the system. The point at which assessment takes place will therefore influence the degree and significance of that impact. Even where we can evidence changes and benefits linked to our research, understanding the causal relationship may be difficult. This involves gathering and interpreting information about student level of attainment of learning goals., 2. The verb evaluate means to form an idea of something or to give a judgment about something. Concerns over how to attribute impacts have been raised many times (The Allen Consulting Group 2005; Duryea et al. Findings from a Research Impact Pilot, Institutional Strategies for Capturing Socio-Economic Impact of Research, Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, Introducing Productive Interactions in Social Impact Assessment, Measuring the Impact of Publicly Funded Research, Department of Education, Science and Training, Statement on the Research Excellence Framework Proposals, Handbook on the Theory and Practice of Program Evaluation, Policy and Practice Impacts of Research Funded by the Economic Social Research Council. Perhaps it is time for a generic guide based on types of impact rather than research discipline? However, there has been recognition that this time window may be insufficient in some instances, with architecture being granted an additional 5-year period (REF2014 2012); why only architecture has been granted this dispensation is not clear, when similar cases could be made for medicine, physics, or even English literature. The fast-moving developments in the field of altmetrics (or alternative metrics) are providing a richer understanding of how research is being used, viewed, and moved. A discussion on the benefits and drawbacks of a range of evaluation tools (bibliometrics, economic rate of return, peer review, case study, logic modelling, and benchmarking) can be found in the article by Grant (2006). Again the objective and perspective of the individuals and organizations assessing impact will be key to understanding how temporal and dissipated impact will be valued in comparison with longer-term impact. There is a great deal of interest in collating terms for impact and indicators of impact. Evaluative research is a type of research used to evaluate a product or concept, and collect data to help improve your solution. The case study approach, recommended by the RQF, was combined with significance and reach as criteria for assessment. To enable research organizations including HEIs to monitor and manage their performance and understand and disseminate the contribution that they are making to local, national, and international communities. A comprehensive assessment of impact itself is not undertaken with SIAMPI, which make it a less-suitable method where showcasing the benefits of research is desirable or where this justification of funding based on impact is required. While valuing and supporting knowledge exchange is important, SIAMPI perhaps takes this a step further in enabling these exchange events to be captured and analysed. Aspects of impact, such as value of Intellectual Property, are currently recorded by universities in the UK through their Higher Education Business and Community Interaction Survey return to Higher Education Statistics Agency; however, as with other public and charitable sector organizations, showcasing impact is an important part of attracting and retaining donors and support (Kelly and McNicoll 2011). RAND selected four frameworks to represent the international arena (Grant et al. Although some might find the distinction somewhat marginal or even confusing, this differentiation between outputs, outcomes, and impacts is important, and has been highlighted, not only for the impacts derived from university research (Kelly and McNicol 2011) but also for work done in the charitable sector (Ebrahim and Rangan, 2010; Berg and Mnsson 2011; Kelly and McNicoll 2011). The transfer of information electronically can be traced and reviewed to provide data on where and to whom research findings are going. To adequately capture interactions taking place between researchers, institutions, and stakeholders, the introduction of tools to enable this would be very valuable. Definition of evaluation. 3. To allow comparisons between institutions, identifying a comprehensive taxonomy of impact, and the evidence for it, that can be used universally is seen to be very valuable. Authors from Asia, Europe, and Latin America provide a series of in-depth investigations into how concepts of . The ability to record and log these type of data is important for enabling the path from research to impact to be established and the development of systems that can capture this would be very valuable. Evaluate means to assess the value of something. Key features of the adapted criteria . It has been acknowledged that outstanding leaps forward in knowledge and understanding come from immersing in a background of intellectual thinking that one is able to see further by standing on the shoulders of giants. The reasoning behind the move towards assessing research impact is undoubtedly complex, involving both political and socio-economic factors, but, nevertheless, we can differentiate between four primary purposes. This petition was signed by 17,570 academics (52,409 academics were returned to the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise), including Nobel laureates and Fellows of the Royal Society (University and College Union 2011). Any information on the context of the data will be valuable to understanding the degree to which impact has taken place. << /Length 5 0 R /Filter /FlateDecode >> They aim to enable the instructors to determine how much the learners have understood what the teacher has taught in the class and how much they can apply the knowledge of what has been taught in the class as well. Donovan (2011) asserts that there should be no disincentive for conducting basic research. 2009; Russell Group 2009). 5. In putting together evidence for the REF, impact can be attributed to a specific piece of research if it made a distinctive contribution (REF2014 2011a). The Payback Framework has been adopted internationally, largely within the health sector, by organizations such as the Canadian Institute of Health Research, the Dutch Public Health Authority, the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council, and the Welfare Bureau in Hong Kong (Bernstein et al. Reviewing the research literature means finding, reading, and summarizing the published research relevant to your question. Also called evaluative writing, evaluative essay or report, and critical evaluation essay . Time, attribution, impact. evaluation of these different kinds of evaluands. The Oxford English Dictionary defines impact as a 'Marked effect or influence', this is clearly a very broad definition. This raises the questions of whether UK business and industry should not invest in the research that will deliver them impacts and who will fund basic research if not the government? 0000004731 00000 n Developing systems and taxonomies for capturing impact, 7. HEFCE developed an initial methodology that was then tested through a pilot exercise. Despite many attempts to replace it, no alternative definition has . 0000001883 00000 n The Payback Framework systematically links research with the associated benefits (Scoble et al. What is the Difference between Formative and Summative Evaluation through Example? 0000004019 00000 n Times Higher Education, Assessing the Impact of Social Science Research: Conceptual, Methodological and Practical Issues, A Profile of Federal-Grant Administrative Burden Among Federal Demonstration Partnership Faculty, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, The Australian Research Quality Framework: A live experiment in capturing the social, economic, environmental and cultural returns of publicly funded research, Reforming the Evaluation of Research. Studies (Buxton, Hanney and Jones 2004) into the economic gains from biomedical and health sciences determined that different methodologies provide different ways of considering economic benefits. Definition of Assessment & Evaluation in Education by Different Authors with Its Characteristics, Evaluation is the collection, analysis and interpretation of information about any aspect of a programme of education, as part of a recognised process of judging its effectiveness, its efficiency and any other outcomes it may have., 2. Introduction, what is meant by impact? It is a process that involves careful gathering and evaluating of data on the actions, features, and consequences of a program. One might consider that by funding excellent research, impacts (including those that are unforeseen) will follow, and traditionally, assessment of university research focused on academic quality and productivity. Overview of the types of information that systems need to capture and link. %PDF-1.3 The process of evaluation involves figuring out how well the goals have been accomplished. If metrics are available as impact evidence, they should, where possible, also capture any baseline or control data. 0000007223 00000 n As such research outputs, for example, knowledge generated and publications, can be translated into outcomes, for example, new products and services, and impacts or added value (Duryea et al. The inherent technical disparities between the two different software packages and the adjustment . Impact is often the culmination of work within spanning research communities (Duryea et al. This presents particular difficulties in research disciplines conducting basic research, such as pure mathematics, where the impact of research is unlikely to be foreseen. 2005; Wooding et al. There has been a drive from the UK government through Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and the Research Councils (HM Treasury 2004) to account for the spending of public money by demonstrating the value of research to tax payers, voters, and the public in terms of socio-economic benefits (European Science Foundation 2009), in effect, justifying this expenditure (Davies Nutley, and Walter 2005; Hanney and Gonzlez-Block 2011). This distinction is not so clear in impact assessments outside of the UK, where academic outputs and socio-economic impacts are often viewed as one, to give an overall assessment of value and change created through research. Husbands-Fealing suggests that to assist identification of causality for impact assessment, it is useful to develop a theoretical framework to map the actors, activities, linkages, outputs, and impacts within the system under evaluation, which shows how later phases result from earlier ones. Wooding et al. 2007). Attempts have been made to categorize impact evidence and data, for example, the aim of the MICE Project was to develop a set of impact indicators to enable impact to be fed into a based system. (2005), Wooding et al. As a result, numerous and widely varying models and frameworks for assessing impact exist. The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning. In endeavouring to assess or evaluate impact, a number of difficulties emerge and these may be specific to certain types of impact. In the majority of cases, a number of types of evidence will be required to provide an overview of impact. Other approaches to impact evaluation such as contribution analysis, process tracing, qualitative comparative analysis, and theory-based evaluation designs (e.g., Stern, Stame, Mayne, Forss, & Befani, 2012) do not necessarily employ explicit counterfactual logic for causal inference and do not introduce observation-based definitions. Collecting this type of evidence is time-consuming, and again, it can be difficult to gather the required evidence retrospectively when, for example, the appropriate user group might have dispersed. Understanding what impact looks like across the various strands of research and the variety of indicators and proxies used to evidence impact will be important to developing a meaningful assessment. Impact assessments raise concerns over the steer of research towards disciplines and topics in which impact is more easily evidenced and that provide economic impacts that could subsequently lead to a devaluation of blue skies research. One of these, the RQF, they identified as providing a promising basis for developing an impact approach for the REF using the case study approach. Clearly there is the possibility that the potential new drug will fail at any one of these phases but each phase can be classed as an interim impact of the original discovery work on route to the delivery of health benefits, but the time at which an impact assessment takes place will influence the degree of impact that has taken place. %PDF-1.4 % Any tool for impact evaluation needs to be flexible, such that it enables access to impact data for a variety of purposes (Scoble et al. Classroom Assessment -- (sometime referred to as Course-based Assessment) - is a process of gathering data on student learning during the educational experience, designed to help the instructor determine which concepts or skills the students are not learning well, so that steps may be taken to improve the students' learning while the course is In demonstrating research impact, we can provide accountability upwards to funders and downwards to users on a project and strategic basis (Kelly and McNicoll 2011). We suggest that developing systems that focus on recording impact information alone will not provide all that is required to link research to ensuing events and impacts, systems require the capacity to capture any interactions between researchers, the institution, and external stakeholders and link these with research findings and outputs or interim impacts to provide a network of data. What are the reasons behind trying to understand and evaluate research impact? However, the Achilles heel of any such attempt, as critics suggest, is the creation of a system that rewards what it can measure and codify, with the knock-on effect of directing research projects to deliver within the measures and categories that reward. Incorporating assessment of the wider socio-economic impact began using metrics-based indicators such as Intellectual Property registered and commercial income generated (Australian Research Council 2008). Reviews and guidance on developing and evidencing impact in particular disciplines include the London School of Economics (LSE) Public Policy Groups impact handbook (LSE n.d.), a review of the social and economic impacts arising from the arts produced by Reeve (Reeves 2002), and a review by Kuruvilla et al. And also that people who are recognized as authors, understand their responsibility and accountability for what is being published. Replicated from (Hughes and Martin 2012). Not only are differences in segmentation algorithm, boundary definition, and tissue contrast a likely cause of the poor correlation , but also the two different software packages used in this study are not comparable from a technical point of view. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide, This PDF is available to Subscribers Only. In line with its mandate to support better evaluation, EvalNet is committed to working with partners in the global evaluation community to address these concerns, and is currently exploring options for additional work. If this research is to be assessed alongside more applied research, it is important that we are able to at least determine the contribution of basic research. To be considered for inclusion within the REF, impact must be underpinned by research that took place between 1 January 1993 and 31 December 2013, with impact occurring during an assessment window from 1 January 2008 to 31 July 2013. A Preferred Framework and Indicators to Measure Returns on Investment in Health Research, Measuring Impact Under CERIF at Goldsmiths, Anti-Impact Campaigns Poster Boy Sticks up for the Ivory Tower. Figure 1, replicated from Hughes and Martin (2012), illustrates how the ease with which impact can be attributed decreases with time, whereas the impact, or effect of complementary assets, increases, highlighting the problem that it may take a considerable amount of time for the full impact of a piece of research to develop but because of this time and the increase in complexity of the networks involved in translating the research and interim impacts, it is more difficult to attribute and link back to a contributing piece of research. This is recognized as being particularly problematic within the social sciences where informing policy is a likely impact of research. Two areas of research impact health and biomedical sciences and the social sciences have received particular attention in the literature by comparison with, for example, the arts. The Author 2013. 0000002868 00000 n While the case study is a useful way of showcasing impact, its limitations must be understood if we are to use this for evaluation purposes. different things to different people, and it is primarily a function of the application, as will be seen in the following. By evaluating the contribution that research makes to society and the economy, future funding can be allocated where it is perceived to bring about the desired impact. n.d.). To achieve compatible systems, a shared language is required. For example, the development of a spin out can take place in a very short period, whereas it took around 30 years from the discovery of DNA before technology was developed to enable DNA fingerprinting. 2009). 2006; Nason et al. In the UK, evaluation of academic and broader socio-economic impact takes place separately. By allowing impact to be placed in context, we answer the so what? question that can result from quantitative data analyses, but is there a risk that the full picture may not be presented to demonstrate impact in a positive light? From 2014, research within UK universities and institutions will be assessed through the REF; this will replace the Research Assessment Exercise, which has been used to assess UK research since the 1980s. The traditional form of evaluation of university research in the UK was based on measuring academic impact and quality through a process of peer review (Grant 2006). An evaluation essay is a composition that offers value judgments about a particular subject according to a set of criteria. Systems need to be able to capture links between and evidence of the full pathway from research to impact, including knowledge exchange, outputs, outcomes, and interim impacts, to allow the route to impact to be traced. CERIF (Common European Research Information Format) was developed for this purpose, first released in 1991; a number of projects and systems across Europe such as the ERC Research Information System (Mugabushaka and Papazoglou 2012) are being developed as CERIF-compatible. 2010; Hanney and Gonzlez-Block 2011) and can be thought of in two parts: a model that allows the research and subsequent dissemination process to be broken into specific components within which the benefits of research can be studied, and second, a multi-dimensional classification scheme into which the various outputs, outcomes, and impacts can be placed (Hanney and Gonzalez Block 2011).

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