Responsive Evaluation

With his 1973 address titled "Program Evaluation, Particularly Responsive Evaluation," Robert Stake offered a new vision and rationale for educational and social program evaluation. In this vision, evaluation was reframed from the application of sophisticated analytic techniques that address distant policymakers' questions: of program benefits and effectiveness "on the average" to an engagement with on-site practitioners, about the quality and meaning of their practice. These innovative ideas helped accelerate a transformation of the evaluation enterprise into its current pluralistic character, within which remain multiple and varied legacies of key responsive evaluation principles. This volume offers some of those legacies, representing central epistemological, artistic, and political dimensions of Stake's original commitment to responsiveness. This is the 92nd issue of the Jossey-Bass series "New Directions for Evaluation".