The travelling workshops experiment: An attempt at ‘illuminative evaluation’

Abstract

An account of the background against which a non-traditional strategy of evaluation was adopted in the Travelling Workshops Experiment at Newcastle upon Tyne Polytechnic. The author points out that research rarely proceeds along textbook lines and describes how the clear cut distinctions originally envisaged for the internal and external components of the evaluation ot the project soon became blurred in the process of evolving practicable procedures. At the same time, the research team had to resolve the conflict which arose between pressures towards a traditional, tightly controlled approach to evaluation and their own preference for a more exploratory strategy in which behavioural objectives would not be specified at the outset. An alternative model was found in ‘illuminative evaluation’, which eschews pre- and post-testing in favour of a more wide-ranging study ot the contextual determinants of the success of an innovation. Use of this model nonetheless poses many problems, not the least of which is that illuminative evaluation is a broad strategy rather than a set of specific techniques.