Ascriptive evaluation

From EvaluationWiki

An evaluation done simply in order to determine the merit, worth, or significance of the evaluand. Some evaluations done for a doctoral thesis-for example, of a program that the student has worked for-are not done for a client, but just for the experience with a new model of evaluation being studied; or just because the student has become interested in a particular experimental program that is no longer operating but was influential in the 1990s. Ascriptive evaluation is contrasted with formative and summative evaluation, which are done to assist, respectively, the program developers of the program being evaluated, and the program 'disposers' for that program (i.e., decision-makers about the fate or funding of the program). Sometimes the term 'knowledge-oriented' is used to distinguish what are here called ascriptive evaluations (from 'decision-oriented' ones), but that's a false contrast, since the results of formative and summative evaluations are also knowledge. What is sometimes called diagnostic evaluation is a sub-species of ascriptive evaluation, since the diagnostic categories used in evaluation (e.g., clinical disorders in psychotherapeutic evaluation, learning disorders in educational psychology) are all evaluative categories, so one is determining the particular variety of evaluative state of the evaluand. Traditionally, diagnostic evaluation was taken to be summative evaluation since it is typically used as a guide to disposition of the case; but of course in historical diagnosis-e.g., deciding whether Hitler was a psychopath-this is not true, so ascriptive is a better classification now that a tripartite taxonomy has replaced the bipartite one. It should be kept in mind that ascriptive evaluation, which is a kind of pure research at the time it is done, may have a huge audience and huge consequences, even though aimed at neither. The audience is there because people are extremely interested in matters of merit-road tests of the latest Ferrari boost the sales of car magazines heavily, though essentially none of the readers are going to buy or design one, and evaluations of charter schools are likewise extremely interesting to many childless citizens. The effect is there because the 'readers from interest' include many of the opinion-shapers in the community, who control by vote or influence within their range. This is just the same story as with pure scientific research, which often turns out to have huge practical consequences some time after it is done (the atomic bomb for example). In evaluation terms, the goals of an activity are often not the determinant of its most important consequences; and this is as true of an evaluation as it is of a program being evaluated.