ts contribution to the field.
One of the focal points of this paper is the work that Carol Weiss has done in developing concepts of program evaluation. However, her work is not limited to program evaluation. She has provided important information about program development, decision making, and program evaluation.
Carol Weiss is currently Professor of Education at Harvard University, with a Ph.D. In sociology from Columbia University. She serves as chair of the task force on evaluation of the Harvard Project on Schooling and Children and teaches courses on evaluation, research methods, and organizational decision-making. Her current research focuses on the relevance of research knowledge to educational policy-making and school improvement. Her research interests are policy analysis and evaluation, policy formulation, and policy implementation, along with decision-making methods and evaluation methods (Carol H. Weiss, 1999).
Since the emphasis of this paper is program evaluation, let us look at Weiss' understanding of what that means. For her, the domain of evaluation is fairly wide. It covers judgments of many different sorts, and judgments of many different phenomena. Her province, however, is a particular kind of evaluation that relates to programs and policies that are designed to help people improve their lives. She is also concerned with evaluation research, which is the effort to make the process of evaluation ever more systematic and accurate. She offered the following definition of evaluation, which is a provisional one which she elaborated throughout her book:
Evaluation is the systematic assessment of the operation and/or the outcomes of a program or policy, compared to a set of explicit or implicit standards, as a means of contributing to the improvement of the program of policy (Weiss, 1998, 4).
There are five key elements in that definition for her. First, evaluation research is system...