Evaluation Matters—He Take Tō Te Aromatawai 1: 2015

Keynote Presentation
Our House, Our Whare, Our Fale: Building Strong Evaluation in Aotearoa New Zealand
Annual Conference of the Aotearoa New Zealand Evaluation Association (ANZEA)
Te Papa, Wellington, 7–10 July 2014

Cultural fit is a concept that can be applied to the effectiveness of one’s evaluation practice as well as the interventions that seek to help people. We argue that there is substantial vagueness about being culturally competent, or culturally responsive, or both, and that the concepts these terms are attempting to embody can be viewed better as a continuum of skills, knowledge, attitudes, and positioning. We propose replacing these terms with the… Read more

Practitioner competence is a critical ingredient in the development of a robust, valid and equitable evaluation. In Aotearoa New Zealand the evaluator competencies identify cultural competence as a core capability. There are some particular challenges that Pākehā (New Zealand European) evaluators face in developing this competency. In grappling with these complex challenges, and in the absence of a pragmatic and systematic way of responding, the writers discuss… Read more

Wairua (spirit) is threaded through the cultural beliefs, practices, and values of Māori, the indigenous peoples of New Zealand. It is an inherent part of the daily life and cultural vitality that is embedded in Māori services and programmes. In a wānanga (forum for discussion and learning) Māori and Pasifika (peoples from the Pacific Islands, especially Polynesia, who reside in Aotearoa New Zealand) evaluators were asked to share their thoughts about how … Read more

Whānau Ora, introduced as a government initiative in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2010, was designed to support collaboration and effective service delivery by Māori non-government organisations. The aim of Whānau Ora is to improve heath and social outcomes for whānau. Action research was conducted to support this initiative, with action researchers walking alongside Whānau Ora collectives to support their collaborative planning, research, evaluation and reflection.… Read more

The authors of the article “Evaluation reasoning in public-sector evaluation in Aotearoa New Zealand” stated that evaluation reports are not available on the website of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) (p. 158). NZQA has advised that all completed external evaluation and review reports of tertiary institutions other than universities have been regularly published on its website since 2009. The authors apologise for this error.

This article reports the results of a meta-evaluation of 30 publicly accessible evaluation reports written or commissioned by 20 New Zealand public-sector agencies during the period 2010–2013 to understand how evaluative reasoning is being practised in Aotearoa New Zealand. The reports were examined to find evidence of five key elements of evaluative reasoning, namely, evaluative objectives or questions, criteria or other comparator(s), defined standards, a… Read more