Fournier, Deborah M.

(b. 1956, Manchester, New Hampshire). Ph.D., M.S. Instructional Design, Development and Evaluation, Syracuse University; B.S. University of Maryland.

Fournier is Assistant Professor and Director of Educational Research and Evaluation, School of Dental Medicine, Boston University. As Director, her role is to advance the School of Dental Medicine's vision of pursuing excellence in teaching and learning through the support of faculty in the (a) design, development, and delivery of instruction that is grounded in learning theory and cognitive science research; (b) evaluation of programs, policies, faculty, and students that enables continuous improvement; (c) analysis, interpretation, and use of data to sustain evidence-based decision making; and (d) study of teaching and learning to measure impact and institutional effectiveness.

Since 1996, she has served on an annual site visit team as Curriculum Consultant to the National Council on Dental Accreditation, which reviews schools of dental medicine. She is Cochair of the Curriculum Committee and Chair of the Evaluation and Dissemination Committee, School of Dental Medicine, and also a member of the Advisory Board for the Center for Excellence in Teaching at Boston University.

Her primary contributions to the field of evaluation center on exploring evaluative reasoning and the warrantability of approaches and applied inquiry methods. Primary influences on her evaluation work include the kinds of warrants used to support evidence collected by evaluators to build defensible evaluations. She is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the American Journal of Evaluation and a past Editorial Assistant of New Directions for Program Evaluation. She is an active member of the American Evaluation Association, where she is Past Chair of the Topical Interest Group on Theories of Evaluation.