Invitation to Provide Feedback on the AEA Draft Competencies
In 2015 the AEA Board of Directors appointed a Task Force to develop a set of evaluator competencies for the association. The membership of the American Evaluation Association has previously endorsed three documents that have contributed to the professionalization of our field:
● The Joint Committee’s Program Evaluation Standards, currently in their 3rd edition (2011, http://www.jcsee.org/program- evaluation-standards-statements)
● AEA’s Guiding Principles for Evaluators (revised in 2004, http://eval.org)
● AEA’s Cultural Competence Statement (2011, http://eval.org)
The proposed competencies will be the fourth such document.
Working over the course of the spring and summer last year, the Task Force reviewed existing sets of general and subject-specific competencies for program, policy, and personnel evaluation to identify foundational competencies necessary to the diverse evaluation practice of AEA members. In addition, the Task Force developed and implemented a plan to engage member feedback. At the 2015 AEA annual meeting in Chicago, the Task Force held a lively listening session and a day-long meeting to process people’s input on the initial draft. As a result, we revised the draft competencies early in 2016.
You may access the draft competencies themselves here.
WE NOW SEEK YOUR HELP in critiquing this latest draft set of competencies to make sure that they make sense in the many contexts in which AEA members practice. We are asking for your feedback on the form and content of the current draft of foundational competencies.
● We seek to identify necessary competencies. Evaluation is clearly a context-dependent activity, and AEA evaluators practice evaluation in many different places and ways. The AEA Evaluator Competencies will be the general competencies that every evaluator or team of evaluators should have, regardless of context.
● These draft competencies are emphatically not final versions. They are initial drafts for discussion and input, and they will be revised again following this round of feedback.
We are now soliciting your opinions on the current draft set of competencies and its potential uses. We also want to hear your thoughts on the opportunities created by and the risks associated with defining and endorsing a set of evaluator competencies to guide evaluation professionals. Results will be used in the next revision of the draft competencies. In addition, we plan to analyze the results of all the feedback for presentation at the 2016 AEA annual meeting in Atlanta.
Please send comments to the Task Force by writing an email to competencies@eval.org. We welcome your input.
