In recent years, evaluability assessment (EA) has seen increased use across the world by foundations and governments driven by a desire to see impact of its investments in programs, services, and initiatives. EA has been embraced as a tool to help ready programs for outcome evaluation, its historical use that continues today. A parallel trend with the increased use of EA is that EA is being used for a variety of other uses important to evaluators and others interested in evaluation of programs. For example, EA is now being used to increase stakeholder involvement, development of evaluation capacity, program technical assistance, and to enhance culturally-responsive evaluation work. This presentation will briefly trace the history of EA, document its recent trend in use, and provide examples of EA use not commonly associated with this evaluation strategy.

Dr. Mike Trevisan is dean of the College of Education at Washington State University and professor of Educational Psychology. In recent years his scholarly work has focused on evaluability assessment, evaluation capacity development for K-12 educato

rs and mental health professionals, and evaluation of K-12 school-based counseling programs. He published the most recent book on evaluability assessment (along with Dr. Tamara Walser), Evaluability assessment: Improving Evaluation Quality and Use Across Disciplines (SAGE 2015). Recently, he published the first book on evaluation of K-12 school counseling programs (along with Dr. Jay Carey), Program Evaluation in School Counseling: Improving Comprehensive and Developmental Programs (Routledge 2020). Dr. Trevisan has provided workshops on program evaluation and evaluability assessment to graduate students, faculty, and professionals in Canada, Denmark, Greece, India, Italy, Korea, and Thailand. He is a founding member of the International Society for Policy Research and Evaluation in School-based Counseling (ISPRESC) and the current chair of ISPRESC.