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Program Evaluation

A CONSIDERATION OF DONALD T. CAMPBELL

When Donald T. Campbell died in 1996, he was widely eulogized in a number of diverse publications, and each of the acknowledgments emphasized the catholicity of his work. (His range of topics is seen in the annotated bibliography at the conclusion of this essay.)

Particularly germane to this class project is the fact that Campbell was one of the first scholars to recognize that program evaluation had to be considered as a systems process, and that the system must be first understood. All of Campbell=s body of work (including some 250 widely-quoted and emulated articles) suggest that man=s attempts at classification and codification represent one point on a continuum that shows man=s attempt to make sense of his environment.

This attempt is the underlying proposition of Asystems theory,@ a concept defined in the American Heritage Dictionary (1988) as Aa regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a unified whole; an assemblage of substances that is in or tends to equilibrium; harmonious arrangement or pattern; an organized set of doctrines, ideas or principles usually intended to explain the arrangement or working of a systematic whole." That capsulizes quite accurately Campbell=s thinking.

As early as 1959, Campbell was presenting his views of the interconnections between all biological systems, interconnections that show the necessary integrity between different elements, a concept that has been embraced by many disciplines, including business, engineering, philosophy, education, physics, cybernetics, social science, and more.

The majority of his work, then, was to arrange empirical fields in a hierarchy of complexity of organization of their basic 'individual' or unit of behavior, and to try to develop a level of abstraction appropriate to each. For example, he noted the fact that cells create organs which create organisms which are either self-maintain...

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Program Evaluation. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 00:45, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1706894.html