ABSTRACT
Program evaluation has increasingly become an important function in contemporary adult and continuing education practice. The skill sets needed to design, implement, and produce effective evaluations, however, have been overlooked in many adult education graduate programs. This chapter identifies these skills and discusses how adult educators may implement them in practice. An important skill of adult education evaluators is to determine the types of evaluative decisions that are appropriate to the situation and expected from stakeholders. Besides determining when to evaluate a program, the skilled evaluator will target program elements for evaluation that are expressly of greatest interest to stakeholders. Although comprehensive program evaluations take into account all program elements, stakeholders often seek evaluations of classroom activities, learning transfer, community impact, or adherence to external criteria. Using a logic model, the evaluator notes that inputs such as instructors, knowledge, facilities, and technology are needed to support a cluster of activities called learning (component).
