Impartiality

Impartiality is an evaluation stance implying the lack of preference in the evaluator for the values or aims of any constituency or interest group in a program and expressing a formal disinterest in respect to outcomes. A position of impartiality involves the evaluator setting aside personal judgment to concentrate on feeding the judgments of participants. As Stenhouse put it, “instead of discriminating between alternative courses of action, [such an approach] seeks to make actors more discriminating.” This is a methodological principle, not an ontological claim. We may consider a difference between evaluators being impartial and being value free. Acknowledging the inevitability of evaluators' holding values in relation to program goals or activities, we may, nonetheless, conceive of an act of cognitive editing in which evaluators ...