Stake, Robert E.

(b. 1927, Adams, Nebraska). Ph.D. Psychometrics, Princeton University; M.A., B.A., University of Nebraska.

Stake is Emeritus Professor of Education and Director of the Center for Instructional Research and Curriculum Evaluation (CIRCE) at the University of Illinois. Previously, he held faculty positions at Teachers College University of Nebraska, where he did research on testing, instruction, television teaching, and teaching machines, becoming Faculty Research Coordinator in 1962; the University of Connecticut; Central State College of Washington; Harvard University; the University of British Columbia; Universidad do Espirito Santo; the University of East Anglia; and Simon Fraser University. He has presented workshops and seminars at numerous other universities. He was a Fulbright Fellow in Sweden in 1973 and in Brazil in 1984. He has been active in the American Educational Research Association, holding the highest office of two divisions there: Division B, Curriculum and Objectives, and Division D, Testing and Research Design. He helped start the meetings of the May 12 Group and was Associate Director of the Illinois Statewide Testing Program under J. Thomas Hastings.

Stake's contributions to the field of evaluation are many. He participated in the organization of the Evaluation Research Society and the Evaluation Network, which later merged to become the American Evaluation Association. He has been a leader in the development of what has been called “responsive evaluation,” in which inquiry is focused on issues experienced by educators, sponsors, and students in a particular program context. The techniques of ethnography, case study, and investigative reporting have been prominent in his work, in addition to the traditional psychometric data gathering of testing, surveying, and attitude scaling. He describes his field study as predominantly interpretive, naturalistic, particularistic, and qualitative. CIRCE is widely recognized in educational research circles as a site for innovative designs of program evaluation and is visited by leading practitioners from around the world. Among the topics of the evaluative studies directed by Stake have been science and mathematics in U.S. elementary and secondary schools, education of the gifted and model art teaching, development of teaching with sensitivity to sex equity, education of teachers for the deaf, alternative teacher education, environmental education, the training of Veterans Affairs personnel, urban social services, and youth sports.

His doctoral dissertation, Learning Curve Parameters, Aptitudes and Achievements, was published as Psychometric Monograph No. 9. He is the author of books, articles, and reports, including Quieting Reform, a metaevaluation study of an urban youth program called Cities-in-Schools; Custom and[Page 397]Cherishing: The Arts in American Elementary Schools (with Liora Bresler and Linda Mabry); Case Studies in Science Education (with Jack Easley); and two research methods books: Evaluating the Arts in Education and The Art of Case Study Research. In 1988, he received the Paul Lazarsfeld Award of the American Evaluation Association and, in 1994, an honorary doctorate from the University of Uppsala.