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A clearer picture of the impact of the World Health Organization (WHO) normative work including guidelines, codes and regulations is needed. (1,2) Member States and donors want their contribution to [...]

This article uses the 'students as partners' framework to examine the implications of an action research project conducted as part of a film studies module, delivered at a transnational tertiary education provider, a Sino-British university in China. The action research project consisted of the implementation of a system of film nomination and voting that allowed students to actively participate in one element of the syllabus design, namely, the choice of films to be screened and discussed in a segment of the module's curriculum, spanning 3 out of the total 14 weeks of the semester. Using as a dataset a series of semi-structured interviews with students who participated in the project, the article analyses their attitudes towards the process of nomination and voting, and points to future directions of research. By focusing on the intended democratic stakes of the project, the article argues that although the students evidenced some of the expected benefits of the collaboration, they also discursively privileged the role, the experience and the perspective of the teacher over their own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on academic recruitment processes have demonstrated that universities evaluate candidates for research positions using multiple criteria. However, most studies on preferences regarding evaluative criteria in recruitment processes focus on a single country, while cross-country studies are rare. Additionally, though studies have documented how fields evaluate candidates differently, those differences have not been deeply explored, thus creating a need for further inquiry. This paper aims to address this gap and investigates whether academics in two fields across five European countries prefer the same criteria to evaluate candidates for academic positions. The analysis is based on recent survey data drawn from academics in economics and physics in Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the UK. Our results show that the academic fields have different evaluative cultures and that researchers from different fields prefer specific criteria when assessing candidates. We also found that these field-specific preferences were to some extent mediated through national frameworks such as funding systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2015, The Wellcome Trust launched a new strategic approach to its work and created a framework to measure success. This article focuses on a particular dimension of this framework: research impact linked to the Trust's pool of research award holders. This article describes why contribution tracing was chosen as an evaluation approach. It also describes how it was used in innovative ways to handle a large number of cases with potential for impact and develop an organisation-wide evaluation plan that makes the most out of data science techniques while increasing understanding of evaluation and facilitating collaboration and joint planning with colleagues across the organisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing the supply of qualified teachers is a priority in many nations as a prerequisite to accomplishing UNESCO's Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all by the year 2030. Questions remain however concerning definitions and measurement of the intended global indicators. In this article, I argue that the work of the comparative research community has the potential to inform and enrich UNESCO's SDG 4 indicators agenda concerning teachers, but this would require moving from a focus on easy to measure indicators such as teacher qualifications to more meaningful and valid indicators such as teacher qualities, and the quality of their education – a neglected area in the SDG 4 targets. Using evidence from two cross-national studies of mathematics education I propose that engagement with comparative education research may help to re-imagine a sustainable and high-quality teaching-and-teacher education project globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely held within contemporary metaethics that there is a lack of linguistic support for evaluative expressivism. On the contrary, it seems that the predictions that expressivists make about evaluative discourse are not borne out. An instance of this is the so-called problem of missing Moorean infelicity. Expressivists maintain that evaluative statements express non-cognitive states of mind in a similar manner to how ordinary descriptive language expresses beliefs. Conjoining an ordinary assertion that p with the denial of being in the corresponding belief state famously gives rise to Moorean infelicity: (i) ?? It's raining but I don't believe that it's raining. If expressivists are right, then conjoining evaluative statements with the denial of being in the relevant non-cognitive state of mind should give rise to similar infelicity. However, as several theorists have pointed out, this does not seem to be the case. Statements like the following are not infelicitous: (ii) Murder is wrong but I don't disapprove of it. In this paper, I argue that evaluative statements express the kind of states that are attributed by 'find'-constructions in English and that these states are non-cognitive in nature. This addresses the problem of missing Moorean infelicity and, more generally, goes to show that there are linguistic facts which support expressivism about evaluative discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past three decades have seen considerable debate about affect's influence on judgment. In three experiments, following manipulations of incidental, integral, and cognitively based affect, positive affect results in more efficient processing while negative affect appears to make judgments both less efficient and more effortful. Affect's influence is inferred from the consistency of participants' responses and the pattern of the positive-negative response latency asymmetry reported by Herr and Page, in which positive judgments appear to be relatively effortless and automatic while negative judgments require effortful and controlled processing. Positive affect reduced or eliminated the asymmetry while negative affect exacerbated it. Affect's influence appears consistent with a view of positive affect-induced processing efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I adopt a dyadic perspective to examine the role of social influence on individuals' fulfillment evaluation of shared psychological contracts. I address two research questions on individuals' referent choice and use of referent information and introduce a theoretical framework for categorizing promises. This framework, consisting of the domain and contestability of promises, is used to address the two research questions and predict the effects of referent information on individuals' fulfillment evaluation of shared psychological contracts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluation is essential to understand whether and how policies and other interventions work, why they sometimes fail, and whether they represent a good use of resources. Evaluability assessment (EA) is a means of collaboratively planning and designing evaluations, seeking to ensure they generate relevant and robust evidence that supports decision-making and contributes to the wider evidence base. This article reports on the context, the process undertaken and evidence from participants in an EA facilitated with public service workers involved in implementing a complex, area-based community improvement initiative. This is a novel context in which to conduct an EA. We show how the process allows practitioners at all levels to identify activities for evaluation and co-produce the theory of change developed through the EA. This enables evaluation recommendations to be developed that are relevant to the implementation of the programme, and which take account of available data and resources for evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The components of assessment centers are described and evaluative research is reviewed. Predictive validity of assessment centers appears promising, especially for management positions, although the research comes from too few sources and has some confounding methodological problems. Various alleged outcomes of using centers are found to be largely unsupported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This decade has been marked by the development of several approaches to psychological skills training (PST). To assess current trends in PST in order to ascertain if consumers' needs are being met, a content analysis of PST approaches published in books in North America between 1980 and 1988 was conducted with regard to target populations, content areas, and format characteristics. Based on the content analysis, six needs representing viable future directions for PST are outlined. These needs include targeting youth and coaches in addition to elite athletes, moving beyond basic education into specific implementation procedures, differentiating between psychological skills and methods, adopting a holistic approach based on the interactional paradigm and a personal development model, defining the practice of sport psychology based on the personal development of sport consumers, and facilitating the theory/practice relationship through research-based PST programming and evaluation research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A study of professional employees in two large treatment-oriented organizations reveals a contradiction between the avowed objectives of program research and the acceptance of its findings by those engaged in the program. The ideology of science, which favors the interpretation and communication of research results, often conflicts with organizational mores. These mores favor symbolic research—the ritualistic avowal of the worthwhileness of research about agency problems, coupled with objections to its substance—the advancement of knowledge. Even those expressing a high priority for the use of agency funds or staff time to do research were reluctant to interpret or publish research findings. Interpretation readiness was greater for "encouraging findings" than for "discouraging findings." Only a minority expressed an attitude favorable to taking the risks which are believed to exist when information with evaluative implications is widely disseminated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper proposes a novel usage-based approach to modal and illocutionary analysis. As a case study, it provides a holistic picture of the interplay between evaluations and face-work (i.a. Goffman, 1967) as they occur in the Spoken Callhome corpora of Mandarin and American English. We plotted a conditional inference tree model (Hothorn et al., 2006) to gather what we call language-specific illocutional concurrences (IC). IC encompass converging factors at various levels of verbal experience that contribute both locally (i.e. at the morphosyntactic level) and peripherally (i.e. at the illocutionary level) to the encoding of contextually and culturally situated speech acts or pragmemes (i.a. Mey, 2001; Author, 2016a). From this study will emerge that Mandarin evaluations tend to include a higher number of instances of propositional face-work, viz. cases where the speaker overtly addresses the hearer as the target of his/her evaluation. Similarly, Mandarin evaluations show higher illocutional complexity, in the sense of having a more diverse pool of overtly coded dimensions that speakers account for whilst making evaluations. Finally, Mandarin evaluations also show a stronger tendency to overtly account for harmonious rapport-maintenance (i.a. Goffman, 1967; Spencer-Oatey, 2008) and intersubjectivity (i.a. Traugott and Dasher, 2002; Traugott, 2010). Highlights • Illocutional concurrences (IC) emerge from various levels of situated speech acts. • Mandarin evaluations show a greater tendency to directly target the Addressee. • Mandarin evaluations are characterised by higher illocutional complexity. • Face-work is a more prominent dimension of Mandarin evaluations. • Mandarin evaluations show more frequent clause-peripheral marking of intersubjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our research posits that decision-making is particularly distressing for individuals with high assessment tendencies. Assessment involves truth concerns about making the 'right' decision. We hypothesize that people with high assessment experience greater distress during decision-making because of their concerns about making a wrong decision. In four studies of chronic assessment conducted across four different decision contexts, we found assessment to be positively associated with distress, with this relation being mediated by concerns with being wrong. A meta-analysis of these results provided support for the robustness of this positive association. Finally, a fifth experimental study that induced assessment found the same association with distress. Moreover, an implicit measure of truth concerns mediated this positive association. Given the prevalence of decision-making activities in everyday life, our findings about how truth concerns can cause distress have important implications for the psychological well-being of assessment-oriented individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the coming years, public programs will capture even more and richer data than they do now, including data from web-based tools used by participants in employment services, from tablet-based educational curricula, and from electronic health records for Medicaid beneficiaries. Program evaluators seeking to take full advantage of these data streams will require novel statistical methods, such as Bayesian approach. A Bayesian approach to randomized program evaluations efficiently identifies what works for whom. The Bayesian approach design adapts to accumulating evidence: Over the course of an evaluation, more study subjects are allocated to treatment arms that are more promising, given the specific subgroup from which each subject comes. We identify conditions under which there is more than a 90% chance that inference from the Bayesian adaptive design is superior to inference from a standard design, using less than one third the sample size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Treatment effect estimates from a regression discontinuity design (RDD) have high internal validity. However, the arguments that support the design apply to a subpopulation that is narrower and usually different from the population of substantive interest in evaluation research. The disconnect between RDD population and the evaluation population of interest suggests that RDD evaluations lack external validity. New methodological research offer strategies for studying and sometimes improving external validity in RDDs. This article examines four techniques: comparative RDD, covariate matching RDD, treatment effect derivatives, and statistical tests for local selection bias. The goal of the article is to help evaluators understand the logic, assumptions, data requirements, and reach of the new methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is the fifth in a series on the relationship of evaluation theory and practice. It was commissioned by the Eastern Evaluation Research Society and the American Evaluation Association as part of The Chelimsky Forum, launched in 2013 to honor Eleanor Chelimsky, one of the most influential and respected program evaluators of our era, and the former director of the Program Evaluation and Methodology Division of the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the forum is aimed at discussing challenges in the fit between theory and practice and strategies for addressing them. This article focuses on the relationships between evaluators and their users, especially policy makers. It tries to see things through the eyes of these users, recognizing their values and concepts related to evidence, proof, and “the truth” as they see it. It therefore tries to come to grips with the common core of evaluation thinking among a host of such clients, aiming to speak to them in their own language, but without sacrificing evaluator independence. It also recognizes the modern world of electronic reports and the possibility of both widespread and targeted dissemination of evaluation results. Finally, it offers some hints about evaluator development in this modern world, especially in the volatile world of policy and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

George Grob presented the fifth and final Eleanor Chelimsky Forum address at the 2017 annual meeting of the Eastern Evaluation Research Society. In this commentary, I respond to several points that George raises in the American Journal of Evaluation paper based on that address. An overarching theme of my comments involves the potential for strengthening the linkages between evaluation theory and evaluation practice. Research on evaluation should also be added to this pairing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]