RESEARCH METHOD COHEN ok

RESEARCH AND EVALUATION 45
to extend the TVEI project was made without
any evaluation reports having been received
from evaluation teams in Leeds or the National
Foundation for Educational Research. (The Technical
and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI)
was a 1980s UK government-funded project frequently
targeted to lower-attaining students.) This
echoes James (1993) where she writes:
The classic definition of the role of evaluation as
providing information for decision-makers ...is a
fiction if this is taken to mean that policy-makers
who commission evaluations are expected to make
rational decisions based on the best (valid and
reliable) information available to them.
(James 1993: 119)
Where evaluations are commissioned and
have heavily political implications, Stronach and
Morris (1994) argue that the response to this is
that evaluations become more ‘conformative’ (see
http://www.routledge.com/textbooks/
9780415368780 – Chapter 1, file 1.13. ppt),
possessing several characteristics:
Being short-term, taking project goals as given
and supporting their realization.
Ignoring the evaluation of longer-term learning
outcomes, or anticipated economic or social
consequences of the programme.
Giving undue weight to the perceptions of
programme participants who are responsible
for the successful development and implementation
of the programme; as a result, tending to
‘over-report’ change.
Neglecting and ‘under-reporting’ the views of
classroom practitioners, and programme critics.
Adopting an atheoretical approach, and
generally regarding the aggregation of opinion
as the determination of overall significance.
Involving a tight contractual relationship with
the programme sponsors that either disbars
public reporting, or encourages self-censorship
in order to protect future funding prospects.
Undertaking various forms of implicit advocacy
for the programme in its reporting style.
Creating and reinforcing a professional
schizophrenia in the research and evaluation
community, whereby individuals come to
hold divergent public and private opinions,
or offer criticisms in general rather than
in particular, or quietly develop ‘academic’
critiques which are at variance with their
contractual evaluation activities, alternating
between ‘critical’ and ‘conformative’ selves.
The argument so far has been confined to
large-scale projects that are influenced by and
may or may not influence political decisionmaking.
However, the argument need not remain
there. Morrison (1993), for example, indicates
how evaluations might influence the ‘micropolitics
of the school’. Hoyle (1986), for example,
asks whether evaluation data are used to bring
resources into, or take resources out of, a
department or faculty. The issue does not relate
only to evaluations, for school-based research, far
from the emancipatory claims for it made by action
researchers (e.g. Carr and Kemmis 1986; Grundy
1987), is often concerned more with finding out
the most successful ways of organization, planning,
teaching and assessment of a given agenda rather
than setting agendas and following one’s own
research agendas. This is problem-solving rather
than problem-setting.Thatevaluationandresearch
are being drawn together by politics at both macrolevel
and micro-level is evidence of a growing
interventionism by politics into education, thus
reinforcing the hegemony of the government in
power. Several points have been made here:
There is considerable overlap between
evaluation and research.
There are some conceptual differences between
evaluation and research, though, in practice,
there is considerable blurring of the edges of
the differences between the two.
The funding and control of research and
research agendas reflect the persuasions of
political decision-makers.
Evaluative research has increased in response
to categorical funding of research projects.
The attention being given to, and utilization of,
evaluation varies according to the consonance
between the findings and their political
attractiveness to political decision-makers.
Chapter 1