Evaluation, History of

Many disciplines have contributed to the field of evaluation, but education and the social sciences have long played major roles in this area. There have been both philosophical and cultural shifts in the field of evaluation over time. Egon Guba and Yvonna Lincoln have described evaluation’s ideological progression as proceeding through four generations: measurement, description (objectives focused), judgment (decision focused), and constructivism. Furthermore, the history of evaluation reflects the broader societal story of economic ebbs and flows, the burgeoning of measurement and standardization, and the emergence of multicultural inclusion. This entry looks at influences on evaluation and discusses shifts in the field’s ideology and practice over time, with a focus on the 20th and early 21st centuries.

The first recording of evaluation was in the late 18th century, with the onset of testing to assess performance. Around this time, evaluation was also used to assess programs for public health and occupational training. In the 19th century, the use of evaluation became more formal both within the field of education and in the military with the standardization of production. In this era, an emphasis on testing emerged as well as the use of scientific experiments using control and comparison groups for evaluating education.

In the early 20th century, a focus on district-level efficacy in education arose. By the 1930s, evaluation was being used in a variety of areas with social science research being applied to learn the effectiveness of various social programs. Evaluation in this era ostensibly emphasized measurement.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Ralph Tyler’s work on the 8-year study created a foundation for evaluation as a discipline. Some think of Tyler as “the father of educational evaluation.” Prior to this period, there had been a focus on quantitative methods and testing in particular. Tyler emphasized objectives and outcomes, framed objectives in terms of behavior, and urged that multiple methods be used in learning the extent to which objectives were manifested as outcomes. He also asserted the need to include teachers in the development of curricula and programming as well as tailor the research on effectiveness to the school setting. He recognized the necessary variance in objectives between schools and that one method or set of methods cannot be used in all situations.

Stafford Hood, a prominent African American evaluator, found that notable African American educational evaluators in the Tylerian period, such as Reid E. Jackson and Leander Boykin, were left out of the overarching discussion on evaluation, despite scholarly contributions to methods and approaches. Boykin, for example, was beyond his time, in asserting that multiple stakeholders, from students and parents to teachers, should play important roles in the evaluation process. This exclusion reflected the overarching social predicament in the United States around race and equity.