ABSTRACT
Evaluation plays an increasingly important role in the development of educational projects and courses, and it is, therefore, important to examine evaluation models to see how they may be refined to make them appropriate to a particular educational situation. My own problem has been to carry out an evaluation of an undergraduate women’s studies course, at a distance teaching university: the Open University of Britain. The aims of the course and its content material are grounded in value-based theories of sexual equality and liberation, values which I share. In a most obvious way this evaluation was one where attempts at value ‘neutral’ evaluation would have at worst been dishonest, and at best simply incapable of exploring some of the more problematic issues faced both by students and staff on the course. However, this is not an unusual situation in the context of educational evaluation, because education is not a value free activity, and those of us involved in it: professional educationalists and educators, researchers and evaluators, subscribe to its values. I believe, therefore, that the evaluation model I describe here has applications outside the area of women’s studies, in situations where the evaluator has a commitment to the values of the educational programme, and where the purpose of the evaluation is to explicate these and to contribute to the success of the programme based on them.
