Developmental Evaluation

The purpose of a developmental evaluation is to help develop the intervention or program. In developmental evaluation, evaluators become part of the program design team or an organization's management team. They are not apart from the team or merely reporting to the team but are fully participating in decisions and facilitating discussion about how to evaluate whatever happens. All team members, together, interpret evaluation findings, analyze implications, and apply results to the next stage of development. Evaluators become involved in improving the intervention and use evaluative approaches to facilitate ongoing program, project, product, staff, and organizational development. The evaluator's primary function in the team is to facilitate and elucidate team discussions by infusing evaluative questions, data, and logic and to support data-based decision making in the developmental process. In this regard, developmental evaluation is analogous to research and development (R&D) units in which the evaluative perspective is internalized in and integrated into the operating unit. In playing the role of developmental evaluator, the evaluator helps make the program's development an R&D activity.

Developmental evaluation changes the role of the evaluator from that of a facilitator of evaluation only, adding to it the tasks of facilitating program or organizational development. There are sound arguments for defining evaluation narrowly to distinguish genuinely evaluative efforts from other kinds of organizational engagement. However, on a comprehensive menu of possible evaluation uses, organizational development is a legitimate use of evaluation processes. What is lost in conceptual clarity and purity with regard to a narrow definition of evaluation that focuses only on judging merit or worth is made up for with a gain in appreciation for evaluation expertise. When evaluation theorists caution against crossing the line from rendering judgments to offering advice, they may underestimate the valuable role evaluators can play in design and program improvement based on cumulative knowledge. Part of the value of an evaluator to a design team is the evaluator's reservoir of knowledge (based on many years of practice and having read a great many evaluation reports) about what kinds of things tend to work and where to anticipate problems. Young and novice evaluators may be well advised to stick fairly close to the data. However, experienced evaluators have typically accumulated a great deal of knowledge and wisdom about what works and what does not work. More generally, as a profession, the field of evaluation has generated a great deal of knowledge about patterns of effectiveness. That knowledge makes evaluators valuable partners in the design process. Crossing that line, however, can reduce independence of judgment. The costs and benefits of such a role change must be openly acknowledged and carefully assessed with primary intended users.