When planning a process evaluation, evaluators need to ensure that there is sufficient expertise and experience to decide on, and achieve, its aims.
Conclusions: To overcome the challenges of evaluation in real-world settings, evaluators need to continuously develop innovative approaches that take advantage of new theoretical and methodological approaches.
Different approaches were also used to capture positive and negative outcomes, suggesting that evaluators need to decide at what level they are evaluating and how to tie effects back to the project's contribution.
Educational evaluators need to catch up with their medical colleagues and consider the impact of No Child Left Behind on such important outcomes as achievement in subjects not tested and continuing motivation to learn in all subjects.
Research chemists, and scientific evaluators, need therefore to understand more closely the origin, the limitations and the virtues of these indicators in contemporary chemical research.
However, the combination is not a simple addition of the two, but a process in which evaluators "need to understand the local context in substantial detail, such that the outcome reflects the process itself".
Health information technology evaluators need to distinguish between intervention efficacy as assessed in the ideal circumstances of clinical trials and intervention effectiveness as assessed in the real world circumstances of actual practice.
"Evaluators need to be well-trained to actually accurately identify what they're seeing, and judges need to be well trained, because you don't see what you're not looking for," said Judge Katherine Tennyson, president of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, who sits on the Multnomah County Circuit Court in Oregon.
First, the programme evaluators need specialized training in qualitative methods for rigorous and valid results.
Program managers, investors, and evaluators need real-time information on how program strategies are being scaled up and implemented.
