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New e-book on evaluative rubrics

Judy Oakden wrote this e-book for practitioners and those wanting to use evaluative rubrics. In her mentoring work, she observed that sometimes certain types of rubrics are not well suited for some kinds of evaluation. In these instances, evaluators could get ‘stuck’. Does this sound like you? “We spent weeks writing up the descriptions for ratings categories. Soon the rubrics became bigger than Ben Hur, taking up pages and pages of tables filled with minuscule writing…For us, the ...

Workshop on systems approaches in evaluation practice

Judy Oakden co-facilitated a workshop session with Marah Moore and Jan Noga at the American Evaluation Association Conference in Washington. It was a great chance to connect with others to think about applying systems thinking in our evaluation practice. We used an appreciative inquiry approach to help participants reflect on when systems thinking works well in their evaluation practice. First, we reflected on the questions that matter in developing evaluative criteria. We used four lenses: moti...

New paper published on Adaptive Evaluation

Glenda Eoyang and Judy Oakden recently had a paper called Adaptive Evaluation: A synergy between complexity theory and evaluation practice published in the journal Emergence: Complexity and Organisation.To download the artlcle, click here...

Putting the theory of evaluative rubrics into practice

Joint presentation with Jane Davidson and other Kinnect Group colleagues at CES Vancouver. Along with Jane Davidson, Kinnect Group members, Judy Oakden, Julian King, Nan Wehipeihana and Kate McKegg presented Evaluative Rubrics – delivering well reasoned answers to real evaluative questions recently at the Canadian Evaluation Society in Vancouver, May 2017.You may know what evaluative rubrics are, but how do you do them in practice?How do you use them to: engage stakeholders...

Using evaluative rubrics: Lessons from the field

Judy Oakden presented a paper on evaluation rubrics, and some lessons learned over the last five years’ in their use at the American Evaluation Association conference in Chicago. Drawing on some ideas from Human Systems Dynamics this paper was developed in collaboration with Glenda Eoyang....

Reaching across boundaries in high stakes collaboration

Judy Oakden, along with Kate McKegg and Viv Twyford presented a paper about our learnings about evaluating high stakes collaboration in local government settings at the Australasian Evaluation Society conference.Download PDF here....

So now you’ve got the data – what next?

udy Oakden, along with Irene Guijt and Kate McKegg, presented a paper on collaborative sensemaking to navigate diversity at the Australasian Evaluation Society conference. Click here to download PDF....

Delivering Developmental Evaluation workshops in Australia

Judy Oakden co-presented two full day Developmental Evaluation workshops with Kate McKegg at the Australian Evaluation Association Conference. For more information on these workshops in Melbourne and Canberra click here....

Presenting at ANZEA conference

On 7 July Judy Oakden spoke at the Aotearoa New Zealand Evaluation Association (ANZEA) conference in Auckland on three complexity approaches in Human Systems Dynamics that evaluators can easily use in their work. Her presentation was called ‘A new compass for dealing with complexity when we are all at sea’....

Awarded Human Systems Dynamics professional certification

Judy Oakden received Human Systems Dynamics professional certification from the Human Systems Dynamics Institute (USA). She has expertise in complexity theory and uses HSD in her evaluation practice. In particular she finds:  HSD provides useful process for figuring out what to do next at each stage in the evaluation HSD provides approaches which can be used in developing useful evaluative rubrics which can be used to make judgments of the quality, value and importance of the evaluand ...