Special Topics in Evaluation locates itself within current debates about “impact evaluation” in social development. The’00s witnessed the rise of heated debate about evaluation, impact, rigor, and the production of knowledge. Far from merely academic or philosophical puffery, these debates are influencing policy, strategy, fundraising, hiring, and organizational behavior of donors, NGOs, governments, and private sector agencies. The broad goal of this seminar is to give students hands-on experience applying a core set of evaluation competencies while, at the same time, equipping students to understand how recent paradigmatic debates may be changing ideas of those very competencies.

The seminar, therefore, will cover competencies such as developing logic models, hypothesis generation and testing, operationalizing concepts, kinds of indicators, evaluation designs, budgeting, and matching methods to questions and to the expectations of stakeholders. We will then move from core concepts and competencies to seeing how they inform some evaluation methods/approaches that are controversial yet (may) solve certain measurement challenges that have plagued social development. Specifically, we will look at evaluative practices – and concrete cases – in relation to:

• randomized controlled trials (RCTs)

• social return on investment (SROI)

• participatory numbers (“parti-numbers”)

• qualitative comparative analysis (QCA)

• portfolio or sector-wide evaluation

• collective impact assessment

• Comparative Constituency Voice (CCV)

• “watchdog” agencies? assessment of nonprofit organization?s program quality and results