Countenance Model of Evaluation

In publishing the now classic article “The Countenance of Educational Evaluation,” Robert E. Stake did not mean to create an evaluation model, and to this day, he would assert that it is not a model. Nonetheless, a brief review of the evaluation literature since its publication illustrates its characterization as such. What has captured the imagination of evaluators since the article's 1967 publication in Teachers College Record is Stake's clear distinction between description and judgment (although uses of his work focus more on the description aspect of evaluation), his clarity in dealing with the kinds and sources of data in evaluation, and his discussion of the complexity of any evaluand.

Stake's description of the then-current countenance of evaluation and a suggested fuller, more rounded countenance for educators and evaluators hint at issues relevant in evaluation theory and practice up to this day. For example, both description and judgment are necessary in evaluation, although Stake sees a greater emphasis on description—still true for many evaluators today. He described judgments as data, foreshadowing the contemporary emphasis on values as data. The complexity of education (and programs and evaluation) is reflected in Stake's attention to the connections among antecedents (prior conditions), transactions (processes), and outcomes, which he called contingencies, and between intentions and observations, which he called congruence. He also highlights the typical emphasis on outcomes but enjoins evaluators to consider antecedents and transactions, a suggestion no less relevant today, especially in education.

Although the standards and judgment part of the Countenance article is less frequently mentioned, Stake outlined how the descriptive data matrix was itself the basis for a judgment that could result from a relative comparison of one program to another or an absolute comparison of a program to standards of excellence.

The ideas in the Countenance article are similar to contemporary ideas of Stufflebeam and Provus, and in the article, Stake seriously engaged Scriven's ideas of the role of evaluators, especially with regard to making judgments, and formative and summative evaluation, as well as Cronbach's ideas on generalization.