When program designers and implementers contact a program evaluator, they usually begin with a fairly straight-forward request—“We need to evaluate our program to determine if it worked.” On the surface the request seems simple enough, but it becomes complicated as soon as the program evaluator starts asking questions: “What program outputs do you expect?” “What ...

By J. Cosgrove In her excellent article Data Don’t Drive, Alicia Dowd reminds us that data alone won’t lead to continuous improvement or in fact any improvement at all. I remember sitting in a summer training session at the University of Michigan Assessment Institute and listening to Richard Alford discuss the Craft of Inquiry. It ...