Transdiscipline

Michael Scriven has characterized evaluation as a transdicipline, a discipline that focuses on issues essential to other disciplines but has itself the attributes of a discipline. Statistics, logic, psychometrics, and evaluation are all examples of transdisciplines. Transdisciplines lead to applications of knowledge across a broad range of other disciplines. Evaluation, for example, is used in education, health, human services, engineering, environmental studies, and so on. Because evaluation is a transdiscipline, there is an ongoing debate within the profession and practice about the relative importance of knowledge about evaluation qua evaluation and knowledge about the discipline most closely associated with the evaluand.