This practical, user-friendly resource helps students successfully complete an evaluation capstone: a dissertation, thesis, or culminating project where a student conducts an evaluation as their capstone experience. Authors Tamara M. Walser and Michael S. Trevisan present a framework to support students and faculty in maximizing student development of evaluator competencies, addressing standards of the evaluation profession, and contributing to programs and disciplinary knowledge. Their framework, and this book, is organized by six fundamentals of evaluation practice: quality; stakeholders; understanding the program; values; approaches; and maximizing evaluation use. Throughout the book they use the metaphor of the journey to depict the processes and activities a student will experience as they navigate an evaluation capstone and the six fundamentals of evaluation practice. In pursuit of a completed capstone, students grow professionally and personally, and will be in a different place when they reach the destination and the capstone journey is complete.

they belong. Do communities have rights, indeed even an existence, which are not merely the hypostasis of the individual rights and existences collected in them? This conflict is then more striking as it was a conscious decision of the or ganizers of the workshop to focus attention on what might broadly be called liberal democracies: those societies which share a commitment to the princi ples of democratic participation, to the right of equal concern and respect of all members of the community, and to the basic liberties of association, ex pression, and thought. Ours was not the smug premise, however, that every so ciety which proclaims these principles is sufficiently or even truly devoted to them. But we did assume that we would have enough to do if we explored the implications of these widely shared ideals for the topic of linguistic, ethnic, and national minorities as these problems arise in societies where an appeal to them is not an empty gesture. The nations from which our participants were drawn are societies in which appeal to these principles has some point. They are all societies in which the efforts of politicians and the intelligence of schol ars need not be devoted exclusively to the tactical issues of winning some mod icum of respect for basic human rights from unwilling regimes. And yet all these societies have experienced significant difficulty in determining what the concrete meaning in actual situations of these general principles might be."

Evaluability assessment (EA) can lead to development of sound program theory, increased stakeholder involvement and empowerment, better understanding of program culture and context, enhanced collaboration and communication, process and findings use, and organizational learning and evaluation capacity building. This book provides an up-to-date treatment of EA, clarifies what it actually is and how it can be used, demonstrates EA as an approach to evaluative inquiry with multidisciplinary and global appeal, and identifies and describes the purposes and benefits to using EA. Using case examples contributed by EA practitioners, the text illustrates important features of EA use, and showcases how EA is used in a variety of disciplines and evaluation contexts. This text is appropriate as an instructional text for graduate level evaluation courses and training, and as a resource for evaluation practitioners, policymakers, funding agencies, and professional training.