Pedagogical considerations for the teaching of evaluation

Pedagogy and andragogy refer to the philosophical and empirical assumptions that instructors make about what and how people learn. These assumptions guide much of the subsequent instructional design process, including learning objectives, learning experiences, assessment techniques, and more. Most of the existing literature in evaluator education is descriptive in nature, and there has been limited attention to research on pedagogy specific to evaluation or identification of effective practices for teaching evaluation. As a result, we know very little about the theoretical or practical pedagogy of evaluation. As a first step in understanding this pedagogy, this article first synthesizes relevant concepts, principles of learning, and models of instructional design principles of learning developed in the field of education. The authors then offer case examples of how these ideas, principles, models, and pedagogies apply to five evaluation-specific courses.