I always find AEA to be a conference that both nourishes and energizes me professionally. This year, I kicked off my conference experience in San Antonio with a one-day professional development workshop on Utilization-Focused Evaluation with the revered evaluation thinker Michael Quinn Patton. Through the course of the day, he provided much direction about designing evaluations with results that get used rather than producing reports that “gather dust on a shelf.” In the workshop, Dr. Patton provided convincing support for the utilization practices he suggests by giving examples from his own evaluation work. I left the workshop with a developing utilization toolbox and with the feeling that such evaluations “can be done” with thoughtful planning and diligent work.
During the conference, I had the fabulous opportunity to engage in conversations with Dr. Rodney Hopson and Dr. Henry Frierson, two leaders in the field of culturally responsive evaluation. Each of them gave me many things to ponder, and they also provided highly valuable advice for developing a career in evaluation. I also attended many sessions aligned with my interests in qualitative methodologies, many of which addressed the conference theme of quality as it pertained to qualitative methods. I was thrilled with the methods of data visualization used to demonstrate group collaboration over time in a presentation by a group of design students. Their work revealed some of the ways in which data might be more creatively visualized to effectively communicate evaluation findings to clients and even to better generate discussion about evaluation findings.
Finally, Min Zhu and I presented our study of how providing rubrics to teachers impacts performance assessment scores. We received positive feedback about our work from the audience as well as some thoughtful questions and suggestions that provided direction for further examining the relationships among rubric use, instruction, and student performance assessment scores.
No comments:
Post a Comment