Rogers, Patricia J.

(b. 1961, Melbourne, Australia). Ph.D. Education Policy and Management, Graduate Diploma in Education, B.A. Political Science, University of Melbourne.

Rogers has been driven by both the promise of good evaluation and the threat of bad evaluation. She has been influenced by evaluation pioneers Carol Weiss, Michael Scriven, and Michael Patton, whose different approaches to evaluation form a useful counterbalance, and by Jerome Winston, an Australian evaluation pioneer in systems theory and organizational learning and in asking not, “Did it work?” but, “For whom, in what ways, and how did it work?” She was subsequently influenced by the work of realists, [Page 382]such as Tilley and Pawson (United Kingdom) and Henry, Mark, and Julnes (United States).

Rogers’ contributions to evaluation theory and practice include the following:

• 1.
  Impact evaluation, especially using nonexperimental designs and program theory. She has used program theory since 1986 to guide the monitoring and evaluation of public sector programs, including maternal and child health projects, agricultural research and extension projects, and prisoner diversion programs, and she has written extensively on this, including the program theory chapter in Evaluation Models: Viewpoints on Educational and Human Service Evaluation (Madaus, Scriven, & Stufflebeam, Eds.) and a New Directions in Evaluation issue on program theory. Rogers is currently using program theory as a unifying conceptual framework for the national evaluation of approximately 800 projects funded through the Australian Federal Government's $225 million Stronger Families and Communities Strategy.
• 2.
  Performance monitoring and performance indicators, particularly learning from others’ past experiences of difficulties in developing and using them
• 3.
  The impact of evaluation, including formal utilization of results and formal and informal impacts of the process
• 4.
  Evaluating approaches to program evaluation by articulating and empirically investigating the program theory of the approach, particularly how it is understood to contribute to better programs
• 5.
  Building the evaluation capability of public sector organizations through strategies such as thinking big and starting small and paying attention to both supply and demand issues in evaluation
• 6.
  Encouraging interdisciplinary and international contributions to evaluation theory and practice

Rogers has taught graduate courses in evaluation at Melbourne since 1989 and led workshops in evaluation in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Malaysia, and the United States. She is a foundation member of the Australasian Evaluation Society and a former member of its board. A former Editor of the AES magazine Evaluation News and Comment, she is also a former Chair of the American Evaluation Association Awards committee.

Rogers received the AES 2002 Evaluation Training and Services Award (its highest award) for outstanding contributions to the profession of evaluation and the AES Caulley-Tulloch Prize for Pioneering Evaluation Literature (with Gary Hough) for a paper linking organizational theory and program evaluation.

Married, with two handsome, blue-eyed, blond sons, Rogers lives in the beautiful Australian bush just outside Melbourne.