ABSTRACT
Evaluation is a prevalent activity in contemporary society. We evaluate people; we evaluate products; and increasingly, we evaluate educational programs and projects. Evaluation is one good way of assessing whether or not what we are doing is achieving what it is intended to achieve. It also can be used to examine whether the approach being followed is the best way to achieve the desired result, and sometimes evaluation is intended to question whether what we are doing is appropriate to do at all. Sometimes the major purpose of evaluation is to improve a new program or activity. This is generally referred to as formative evaluation, monitoring or performance review as its results are intended to feed back and improve on-going practice. Summative evaluation, auditing, ex-post evaluation, or compliance evaluation, on the other hand, are terms that apply to evaluations directed at determining whether the program conformed to standards or did what its funders paid for. These types of evaluations also seek to determine the consequences of a program, what it might teach for subsequent programs of this type, and they are often seen as the principal mechanism for making crucial resource allocation decisions about a program, including its continuance or termination.
