Countenance Model of Evaluation

In publishing the now classic article “The Countenance of Educational Evaluation,” Robert E. Stake did not mean to create an evaluation model, and to this day, he would assert that it is not a model. Nonetheless, a brief review of the evaluation literature since its publication illustrates its characterization as such. What has captured the imagination of evaluators since the article's 1967 publication in Teachers College Record is Stake's clear distinction between description and judgment (although uses of his work focus more on the description aspect of evaluation), his clarity in dealing with the kinds and sources of data in evaluation, and his discussion of the complexity of any evaluand.

Stake's description of the then-current countenance of evaluation and a suggested fuller, more rounded countenance for ...