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Approaches to evaluation will become more eclectic and adaptive to contextual circumstances

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Approaches to evaluation will become more eclectic and adaptive to contextual circumstances. Program evaluation will continue to be pluralistic, but will move toward greater pragmatism as evaluators work to provide valid and appropriate findings and conclusions and to improve programs, policies, and decision making in many different settings. Single-method evaluations will be viewed by professional evaluators, if not by the public and some elected officials, as simplistic and inadequate for evaluation of complex programs or those serving diverse populations. Triangulation, cross-validation, and iterative, expansive designs will be used more routinely to allow the complementarity of qualitative and quantitative approaches to enrich evaluation work. The usefulness of the different approaches will lie less in having any one of them serve as a model to be followed slavishly but rather, as House (1994a) has suggested, as collectively comprising the “grammar of evaluation” that evaluators must understand and be skilled in using:

[One] might see the evaluation models as something like model sentences in a grammar of evaluation. . . . As one progresses, . . . one does not need to think about the models consciously, except to correct particular errors or study the grammar itself. Similarly, . . . experienced evaluators can construct evaluation designs which do not depend explicitly on particular models. Actual evaluation designs can be combinations of elements from different models, . . . just as speakers can produce novel grammatical sentences once they have learned the basic grammar of a language. (pp. 241–242)