Program Evaluation

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 bee

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l image, a normative description. a representation of a future system that we create by design. In developing and/or analyzing a general systems model, it is essential to remember that there cannot be one true and complete description of Athe way the world is" B which is to say that there can be no God's eye view of reality. By attempting to do so, one adopts a presupposition of an external perspective: a symbol system external to reality, related to reality by a reference relation that gives meaning to the symbols. In the program field, there are certain basic requirements for model creation and analysis, which are summarized below. To be both valid and useful, certain questions must be asked. A few of those are: 1. What are the intended uses of the model? 2. What interpretations are appropriate? 3. Are inappropriate applications identified? 4. Who is the model designed for? The models chosen for the remainder of this discussion have all been tested by theorists and found to share certain elements in common. First, the observations used in creating a model for validation and norming were of adequate size and were sufficiently representative to substantiate validity statements, to establish appropriate norms, and
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Systems Theory, Universe Designed, Principles Campbell, Heritage Dictionary, FW Woolworth, Donald Campbell, Academic Press, Brain Sciences, Random House, Theory GST, systems theory, bertalanffy 1972, kuhn 1974, closed systems, program evaluation, etzioni 1975, human activity, systems theories, cultural relativism, systems model, york academic press, herskovits cultural relativism, systems theory ideological, theory ideological analysis, bertalanffy 1972 system,
Approximate Word count = 2939
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)