Michael Scriven

So following on from George's very entertaining and enlightening first set of arguments, I'd like to take us through a brief tour through the evolution of evaluation in order to demonstrate to you why evaluation's pluralism is its strength or its external influence.

The late, great Michael Scriven argued in the 1960s that the purpose or evaluation, was to collect evidence to make judgments about the merit or value of an evaluation without concern for how this information would be used by stakeholders.

Now, Michael made a lot of really great contributions to evaluation.

I'm afraid that wasn't one of them.

We're going to talk about evolution, democracy and evaluation identity.

So we did hear about evolution from Rick earlier in the session.

We listened to Michael Scriven roll over in his grave.

because in fact we must evolve or we constrain growth.