Evaluation 15 credits

About the course

Focus of the course
Evaluation is a research-based activity designed to assess the merits of policies and programmes. Increasing demands that policy decisions and public spending are based on evidence, mean that evaluation increasingly permeates all sectors of decision-making in society. The growing social and political significance of evaluation in turn means that evaluations need to be of high quality and informative. 
Against this background, this course focuses on five central questions: What is evaluated? Why evaluate? How should evaluations be conducted? How are evaluations used? How can one assess the quality of evaluations? 

Module 1: Evaluation as practice. 7,5 hp
Module 1 of the course studies evaluation as a social phenomenon, as practice and as a skill. Topics covered in this part of the course include: What is policy and programme evaluation? How does evaluation differ from research? What societal developments explain the growth of evaluation and monitoring systems? How does evaluation relate to the "evidence" debate? From a more practical perspective, the course introduces different evaluation models and discusses how to design evaluations for specific purposes.  

Module 2: The evaluation society and evaluation use, 7,5 hp
Module 2 of the course addresses the following questions: What kind of problems are professional evaluators often confronted with in the course of their work? How are evaluations used? How can we assess the quality of evaluations (meta-evaluation).