Helen Simons

• PhD
• Professor at University of Southampton

Recently, several authors have called for a critical assessment of the normative dimensions of evaluation practice. This article responds to this call by demonstrating how evaluation practice can be enriched through deliberate engagement with care ethics. Care ethics has a relational and practice view of morality and places caring relationships and...

In the context of examining the move towards professionalism in evaluation, this paper explores the concept of Voluntary Evaluator Peer Review (VEPR), indicating the reasons why this is currently being proposed by several evaluation societies. This discussion is prefaced by a brief examination of the extent to which evaluation currently meets commo...

This article presents an argument for how to generalize from a single case study evaluation of a social programme or policy, focusing on two essential elements of case study - context and particularity. Taking an interpretivist perspective and drawing on artistic and humanistic ways of understanding, it examines both different ways of generalizing...

This paper explores the case for schools conducting their own self-evaluation to serve the dual purpose of professional development within schools and accountability demands from external sources. The paper is in three parts. The first outlines the argument and benefits for schools conducting their own case study evaluation of their curriculum poli...

This paper explores the case for schools conducting their own self-evaluation to serve the dual purpose of professional development within schools and accountability demands from external sources. The paper is in three parts. The first outlines the argument and benefits for schools conducting their own case study evaluation of their curriculum poli...

Case Study Research in Practice explores the theory and practice of case study research. Helen Simons draws on her extensive experience of teaching and conducting case study to provide a comprehensive and practical account of how to design, conduct and communicate case study research. It addresses questions often raised by students and common misco...

This article examines the case for the use of the creative arts in the process of designing, conducting, analyzing, and disseminating evaluations. The authors argue that using the creative arts in the process of evaluation evokes different ways of knowing and understanding the values of a program. The insights gained offer a unique addition to eval...

This paper examines the case for the use of the creative arts in the process of designing, conducting, analyzing and disseminating evaluations. The paper argues that using the creative arts in the process of evaluation evokes different ways of knowing and understanding the values of a programe. The insights gained offer a unique addition to evaluat...

Evaluation involves at least four levels of social–political interaction – with government and other agency policy makers who commission evaluation; with participants in the programmes, policies and institutions evaluated; with the evaluation profession; and with the wider audiences to whom evaluators in a democratic society have a responsibility t...

This article explores how using the creative arts in teaching in higher education can engage and empower individuals who learn in different ways, and who may have been excluded from traditional forms of learning which value cognitive and verbal means of learning and assessment. Drawing on an evaluation of a creative arts module in higher education,...

The purpose of this article is to re-examine the current use of what is to count as evaluation evidence to inform professional practice. The provision of evaluation evidence to inform decision making has long been an aspiration, albeit with varying degrees of success. However the need to re-examine the utility of this endeavour has arisen in the co...

We seek to understand why persons develop their musical preferences by identifying with a particular cultural group and social background. This identification is greatly shaped by experience in their environment. Resources employed for this identification are mostly different from those employed in schools to foster academic knowledge. We argue tha...

Governments across the world are seeking improvements in school performance. One avenue to improvement that has been widely promulgated is the reform of teaching through the development of evidence-based practice. This paper reports evaluation data from a national programme in England that sought to put teachers at the heart of the search for evide...

This issue on evidence‐based practice in education locates the rise of contemporary interest in evidence‐based practice in the political culture of our times and the dominant discourse, noted and critiqued in several of the papers, of the government's agenda of ‘what works’. It outlines the motivations and origins of the current movement and the di...

This article offers a justification for school self- evaluation in a democracy, tracing the evolution of the concept from the seventies to the present day. It locates its relevance within a democratic approach to evaluation and case study methodology and outlines a particular model of school self-evaluation that is grounded in a theory of change ge...

This is the final report of the evaluation of th School-Based Research Consortium Initiative which ran in England from 1998 to 2001. The initiative was sponsored via a public/private partnership between the Teacher Training Agency (TTA), a UK Government agency, and the Centre for British Teachers (CfBT), a private not-for-profit company. The aim of...

Following concerns about the falling number of mathematics majors at University level, consideration has being given in a number of countries to enhancing provision for those school pupils who show the potential to study mathematics at University. Prevalent amongst this provision are enrichment opportunities and material designed to provide a wider...

This article examines the impact of cultural codes on the conduct and outcomes of evaluation. Cultural codes are defined as symbols and systems of meaning that are relevant to members of a particular culture (or subculture). These codes can be utilized to facilitate communication within the ‘inside group’ and also to obscure the meaning to ‘outside...

This Executive Summary forms part of the final report of the findings of the independent external evaluation of the NRICH online mathematics project. The evaluation was commissioned by the University of Cambridge, UK as represented by the Millennium Mathematics Project. The evaluation was carried out by the evaluation team from the University of So...

One of the advantages cited for case study research is its uniqueness, its capacity for understanding complexity in particular contexts. A corresponding disadvantage often cited is the difficulty of generalising from the single case. Such an observation assumes a polarity and stems from a particular view of research. Looked at differently, from wit...

Government sponsored educational research is increasingly subject to contractual control over the design of the research, dissemination and publication and even the research process itself. This paper argues that this current policy context poses a threat to the quality of educational research and places severe limitations on the contribution it ca...

Bibl. p. 263-285

Traducción de: Getting to know schools in a democracy Incluye índice Incluye bibliografía Examen de la teoría y la práctica de la evaluación democratica en la escuela, sus implicaciones políticas y sociales, sus condiciones para que sirva como freno eficaz a la privatización y centralización de la información y para apoyar la democratización y part...

Incl. bibl., abstract. This issue on evidence-based practice in education locates the rise of contemporary interest in evidence-based practice in the political culture of our times and the dominant discourse, noted and critiqued in several of the papers, of the government's agenda of 'what works'. It outlines the motivations and origins of the curr...