The Program Evaluation Standards in International Settings

The Appropriateness of Joint Committee Standards in Non-Western Settings 45removed (It is a normal Korean custom to throw away any interview recording after thetranscription).Based on their working experience, participants expressed a broad range of views onseveral of the Standards discussed in this paper. During the discussion time, they often showedunanimous agreement or conflicting opinions. For example, almost all participants agreed withU2 Evaluator Credibility, but had different opinions about P8 Fiscal Responsibility depending ontheir fields (government, education, business, etc.). The participants were 21 graduate students,so rather than generalize the results, this paper focused more on what kind of cultural factorsdrive changes of the notion of Joint Committee Standards.Based on the workshop discussion, I describe unique Korean factors which can be involvedin changing evaluation designs, along with the typical evaluation procedures of deciding focus,collecting, analyzing, interpreting, reporting and managing information. The structure of thispaper follows the typical steps of an evaluation project, and indicates what would be appropriateand inappropriate standards in each step. That is, what standards can be adopted or adapted inKorean setting?The results of the workshop were represented in two-fold. First, the author showed adescriptive statistics from the questionnaire surveys. Then, the remainder of this papersynthesized the workshop discussion notes. This paper did not examine the appropriateness of 30Joint Committee Standards. The first concern of this paper is not in making a decision whethercertain Standard is appropriate or inappropriate in Korean culture. Many workshop participantsagreed that some Standards could be understood in totally different ways rather than they wereinappropriate. Therefore, the author more focused on Korean cultural factors rather than on theoriginal intent of the Standards. Thirteen Standards that might be highly related to Koreancultural factors were examined based on workshop discussion notes among 30 Standards.The purpose of this paper is (1) to try to suggest what standards may be appropriate orinappropriate, (2) to explain why they may be appropriate or inappropriate in consideration ofsome Korean cultural factors, and (3) to provide some useful cultural guidelines for westernevaluators who will conduct evaluation projects in Korea.ResultsDescriptive Statistics of Questionnaire Analysis5-Likert scale (1 Not appropriate at all; 2 Somewhat inappropriate; 3 Don't know; 4 Somewhatappropriate; Very appropriate) questionnaires were used for descriptive statistics. The number oftotal participants was 21. Under each of five scale, the number of participants who chose a scalewas presented, and mean score, standard deviation, minimum and maximum scale were shown inTable 1. Inappropriate Standards that have mean score of less than 2 (scale value: somewhatinappropriate) were highlighted.