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Rick Cummings

Rick Cummings

Emeritus Professor of Public Policy at Murdoch University and veteran Australian evaluator with 40+ years of experience, former President of the Australian Evaluation Society.

Sep 19, 2026

13:31
But then economics crawled up its own
13:33
and

9 MINS LATER

22:05
Beth.
22:09
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.
22:28
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.
22:46
Now, Michael made a lot of really great contributions to evaluation.
22:49
I'm afraid that wasn't one of them.
22:52
I'm glad to say the discipline has moved great distance since Michael made those comments and was popular in the 1960s.

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