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Training Needs of Site Visitors
Author(s) -
Haynes Melissa Chapman,
Johnson Ashley
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
new directions for evaluation
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.374
H-Index - 40
eISSN - 1534-875X
pISSN - 1097-6736
DOI - 10.1002/ev.20268
Subject(s) - accreditation , context (archaeology) , training (meteorology) , quality (philosophy) , medical education , psychology , public relations , political science , medicine , meteorology , paleontology , philosophy , physics , epistemology , biology
A recent “rumination” by Michael Quinn Patton focused on the critical role of the evaluator in the conduct of qualitative evaluation methods (Patton, 2015a). The importance of the evaluator in site visits is no less important. Although it has been proposed that site visits indeed constitute a methodology (Lawrenz, Keiser, & Lavoie, [Lawrenz, F., 2003]), it is essential that the field develop expectations for training of site visitors that are appropriate to the context and purpose of the site visit. In this chapter we provide a working framework for the training needs of site visitors based on what we know from training for accreditation visits, the literature on the psychological development of expertise, and interviews with three novice site visitors. We hope future studies will be conducted that systematically examine and make explicit the need for high‐quality training of evaluators for site visits beyond the context of accreditation.