The Program Evaluation Standards: A Guide for Evaluators and Evaluation Users

The Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation ( is an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) accredited standards developer, sponsored by 17 North American professional organizations. With oversight from the JCSEE, Yarbrough, Schula, Hopson, and Caruthers have revised and illustrated this new edition of the Program Evaluation Standards. These thirty standards support the core attributes of evaluation quality: utility, feasibility, propriety, accuracy, and accountability, and provide guidance to anyone interested in planning, implementing, or using program evaluations.

This new edition:

- Provides extensive attention to cultures and contexts in evaluations

- Encourages reflective practice based on in-depth understanding of standards and their applications

- Suggests flexible approaches for learning how to use the standards

- Includes a new section, Evaluation Accountability, emphasizing metaevaluation for improvement and accountability guided by three new metaevaluation standards

- Includes case scenarios and applications across multiple standards to help users apply the standards individually and in concert

- Offers updated documentation reference lists.

Donald B. Yarbrough, Ph.D., is the Director of the Center for Evaluation and Assessment and Professor of Psychological and Quantitative Foundations at the University of Iowa. He is the current chair of the JCSEE and has been a member since 1996, sponsored until 2008 by the National Council on Measurement in Education. He served as a writer for the Personnel Evaluation Standards and the Student Evaluation Standards and has helped organize and conduct numerous evaluation standards development activities, including national hearings and field trials. In addition to authoring and co-authoring more than 100 evaluation reports, he has published widely on assessment and evaluation. He has received funding from NIH, NSF, FIPSE, DE, HHS, NEA and numerous private foundations. In addition, he currently serves as chair of the NIH Clinical and Translational Science Evaluators Definitions Working Group. He maintains active members in the American Psychological Society, American Evaluation Association, and the American Educational Research Association.

The Joint Committee
Acknowledgements
Preface
Author Page
Introduction
Applying the Standards
The Functional Table of Standards
THE STANDARDS
Utility
Feasibility
Propriety
Accuracy
Evaluation Accountability
Notes
Documentation Reference Lists
Glossary
Index
Appendix A: The 1981 Program Evaluation Standards
Appendix B: The 1994 Program Evaluation Standards