Creating Inspiring Workshops and Courses in Transdisciplinarity: A Guide - Manual / Resource - Page 105
Designing for and reviewing process and impacts
Evaluation
•
Summative evaluation – Most appropriate in contexts that
are fairly well understood where a target project was
undertaken to improve on a prior model or approach.
Summative evaluation aims to understand what a
well-defined project achieved vis-à-vis the needed
improvements, and thus would be conducted at the end
of a project.
•
Developmental evaluation – Most appropriate in complex,
uncertain, changing contexts, where new approaches or
solutions are sought. Projects are undertaken to develop
innovations that can address problems in such challenging
contexts. Developmental evaluation is an ongoing and
integral form of assessing and learning all along the way
as the project is being formed and implemented so as to
rapidly adjust project approaches, methods, participants,
engagement, and outputs and outcomes, as needed.
Evaluation is often thought of as a last step after the completion
of a project. But in TDR projects, thinking about evaluation starts
much earlier in the process and has some core aspects that set it
apart from evaluating conventional disciplinary research projects.
Key considerations for evaluating TDR projects can be grouped
under the following questions:
•
What should be evaluated in transdisciplinary projects,
and how and when should evaluation occur?
•
How does evaluation of TDR differ from other types of
projects?
•
Who should be involved in evaluating TDR projects?
What types of evaluation might be relevant to TDR projects?
One may distinguish three general classes of evaluation, each
of which can have its place in the context of TDR, and each of
which can involve a number of different foci and methods (see
Evaluation Approaches: https://www.betterevaluation.org/
methods-approaches/approaches):
•
Formative evaluation – Most appropriate in contexts that
are already fairly well understood, where substantial
knowledge already exists, but where a situational,
baseline assessment is critical to ascertain how to
improve on a model or approach for addressing a societal
problem. The co-design process can often be usefully
enhanced by a formative evaluation, and thus would be
conducted at the start of a project.
Practices Evaluation
Most commonly, evaluations of research projects fall into the
summative evaluation bin. They aim at providing a summative
picture of what a research project achieved (or didn’t achieve).
But many TDR projects are conducted amid complex, changing,
and often uncertain societal contexts. In such complex, innovative
projects, the summative-evaluation approach can be too limited,
as it does not adequately account for what happened in the
project, and how it informed societal decisions or contributed to
outcomes.
Given the wide range of potential outputs, outcomes, and ways
to impact, it is important to get a broad picture when evaluating
TDR projects. This means being aware of, and assessing, the
results and impacts that were initially intended (see Theory of
p. 100
