"This is a book that will help you plan, do, and report a good evaluation. The book provides a model for doing evaluation in a way that helps individuals and the organizations in which they work to grow and improve. . . . I like that the authors have embedded the discussion of and strategies for communicating evaluation within a well-articulated framework of evaluation. The early chapters do a very nice job of providing a context for thinking about communication that then creates a coherent whole by the book′s end. . . . You should get Evaluation Strategies for Communicating and Reporting―it′s a valuable resource."
--Sandra Mathison, School of Education, State University of New York, Albany
"This book is about how to enhance communication and reporting of evaluation evidence. It places these important tasks of evaluation in the context of organizational learning that means evaluators can best communicate and report with strong collaborative arrangement. This is essentially a technique-oriented book, but places communication skills in an important context, which is one of understanding the organization and the need to make sure that the evidence collected from these techniques is utilized. . . . Evaluation Strategies for Communicating and Reporting has an ample number of examples and practical advice, and it places the role of the evaluator within a larger context of organizational learning."
--Larry Braskamp, College of Education, University of Illinois at Chicago
"I like the consultative approach of writing and I believe it is very appropriate for a book on this topic. I especially liked the coverage on changing organizations, internal evaluation, and the roles of the evaluator."
--John C. Ory, Office of Instructional Resources,
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
"The examples and orienting questions provide clarity and are especially helpful to novice evaluators."
--M. Jean Young, Ph.D. MJ Young & Associates
"Rather than prolong the debate on method, the authors make meaningful claims in support of the integration of quantitative and qualitative approaches as the more viable means to evaluate complex problems in complex organizations framed by critical reflection about processes, practices, and outcomes."
--Linda Ware, Affiliated Programs Office, Kansas University
What communicating and reporting strategies best serve individual and organizational learning? How can these strategies be implemented? This thoughtfully written book answers these questions by providing a model for evaluating in a way that helps individuals and organizations grow and improve. Aimed at helping evaluators facilitate individual, team, and organizational learning by communicating and reporting more effectively, Evaluation Strategies for Communicating and Reporting shows the steps to improve communication through all phases of an evaluation--from planning to final report and follow-up. It provides practical tips and useful examples for people who work exclusively as evaluators and for those who have program management responsibilities that include evaluation. Evaluation Strategies for Communicating and Reporting will prove an invaluable asset for evaluators and those with evaluation responsibilities to better plan, conduct, communicate about, and report evaluations findings.
Rosalie T. Torres, Ph.D. is President of Torres Consulting Group, an evaluation and management consulting firm that specializes in the feedback-based development of programs and organizations. Formerly, she was the Director of Research, Evaluation, and Organizational Learning at the Developmental Studies Center (DSC), an educational, nonprofit organization based in Oakland, California. She earned her Ph.D. in research and evaluation in 1989 from the University of Illinois. Over the past 27 years, she has conducted more than 60 evaluations in education, business, health care, and nonprofit organizations, holding both internal and external evaluator positions. She has authored/coauthored numerous books and articles articulating practice-based theories of evaluation use; the relationship between evaluation and individual, team, and organizational learning; and communicating and reporting evaluation findings. Among them are Evaluative Inquiry for Learning in Organizations (Preskill & Torres, 1999) and Evaluation Strategies for Communicating and Reporting: Enhancing Learning in Organizations (Torres, Preskill, & Piontek, 1996). She is a recent past Board Member of the American Evaluation Association, and served as the Staff Director for the 1994 revision of the Joint Committee’s Program Evaluation Standards. She has taught graduate level research and evaluation courses at Western Michigan University and the University of Colorado (Denver and Colorado Springs campuses), and routinely conducts workshops on various topics related to evaluation practice.
Hallie Preskill, PhD. is a Managing Director with FSG, a global nonprofit strategy, evaluation, and research consulting firm (since 2009), and leads the firm’s Strategic Learning and Evaluation practice. In her role as a senior advisor, she works on a wide variety of evaluation and learning projects. Sample clients include the Kresge Foundation, MasterCard Foundation, Knight Foundation, The California Endowment, Missouri Foundation for Health, Norlien Foundation, Packard Foundation, Northwest Area Foundation, Blue Shield of CA Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. She has helped evaluate a wide range of initiatives and programs related to community information needs, substance abuse, early learning, poverty, arts and culture, teacher professional development, domestic and sexual violence, economic development, youth and education, and healthcare.
Prior to joining FSG, Hallie spent more than 20 years in academia, teaching graduate level courses in program evaluation, training design and development, organizational learning, appreciative inquiry and consulting. Her research has focused on evaluation capacity building, transfer of learning/training, evaluation use, and evaluation as a catalyst for individual, team, and organizational learning. Hallie’s other books include:
Reframing Evaluation through Appreciative Inquiry (2006, with T. Catsambas),
Evaluation in Organizations: A Systematic Approach to Enhancing Learning, Performance & Change (2001, 2009, with D. Russ-Eft),
Evaluation Strategies for Effective Strategies for Communicating and Reporting (2005, with R. T. Torres and M. Piontek), and
Evaluative Inquiry for Learning in Organizations (1999, with R. T. Torres), and
Becoming the Change: What One Organization Working To Transform Educational Systems Learned About Team Learning and Change (2011, with R. Babiera).
Hallie was the 2007 President of the American Evaluation Association. She received the American Evaluation Association′s Alva and Gunnar Myrdal Award for Outstanding Professional Practice in 2002 and the University of Illinois Distinguished Alumni Award in 2004. Hallie holds a PhD from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Mary E. Piontek is an assistant research scientist at the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor where she works with individual faculty, departments/units, and schools/colleges that need assistance designing program evaluation and assessing the effectiveness of initiatives to improve teaching and learning. She has considerable experience doing evaluation research in educational settings and has consulted with foundations, schools and districts, institutions of higher education, and private organizations on program evaluation and educational research issues. Her research and evaluation techniques capture the local context of an organization or program through individual and focus group interviews, in-depth participant observation, document and archival analysis, survey research, and qualitative/quantitative mixed designs. Her research interests include the changing roles of evaluators and their client/stakeholder relationships. She holds a B.A. and M.A. in English Literature and a Ph.D. in Measurement, Research, and Evaluation.
