Evaluation capacity building as a means to improving policy making and public service in higher education

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present a logical framework for evaluation capacity building in higher education agencies, which can be used as an instrument both for grounding future educational policies, and for improving the policies’ implementation process. The logical framework will focus on four main stages that will examine the link between organizational evaluation capacity building and the process of organizational learning. Thus, we discuss the way in which evaluation practice is becoming a routine at the micro level (within the organization) through expert team learning and organizational learning processes and diffuses at macro level (within the system) through system learning and interactions at the system level. These learning processes facilitate the development of institutional characteristics such as evaluation capacity, policy implementation and leadership. The organizational learning process is seen as being founded on a cyclic model of shaping evaluation priorities and developing evaluation structures, selecting evaluation models, training evaluation skills, transforming evaluation into routine and reshaping evaluation priorities once again. To this end, several uses of evaluation practice in the Romanian higher education system are analysed.