Scriven, Michael

(b. 1928, in Beaulieu, Hampshire, England). Ph.D. Philosophy, Oxford University; M.A. combined honors Mathematics and Philosophy, Melbourne University, Australia; B.A. honors Mathematics, Melbourne University.

Scriven is Professor of Philosophy at Western Michigan University and was recently Chair in Evaluation at Auckland University, New Zealand. Previously he held faculty positions at the University of Minnesota; Swarthmore University; Indiana University; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of San Francisco; the University of Western Australia; Pacific Graduate School of Psychology; and Claremont Graduate University. He has taught in departments of philosophy, psychology, mathematics, the history and philosophy of science, and education. He is a former President of AERA and was the first president of one of the two organizations that merged to become the American Evaluation Association. He was also the 1999 President of AEA, as well as Founding Editor of its journal Evaluation Practice (now the American Journal of Evaluation). He has been a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences of Palo Alto, a Whitehead Fellow at Harvard, and a Senior AERA Fellow in Evaluation at the National Science Foundation.

His contributions to the field of evaluation are many. He has influenced the field through (a) the creation of discipline-specific terminology, including the terms formative and summative evaluation, holistic (versus analytic) evaluation, and component (versus dimensional) evaluation, as well as such terms as metaevaluation, goal-free (and goal-based) evaluation, the synthesis step, and the evaluative imperative; (b) the creation of new ways of thinking about evaluation models, such as the idea that goal-based evaluation represents a management approach and bias quite different from needs-based evaluation, which is consumer oriented, and that evaluation is an autonomous discipline, as well as a vital component of all other disciplines; and (c) the idea that evaluation in all domains is an application of the same basic logic, which has contributed to the beginnings of a logic of evaluation.

He has written extensively on the philosophy of science, particularly about the logic of science, causal inference and explanation, and values in science. He is the author of more than 300 publications, including such books as The Logic of Evaluation and Evaluation Thesaurus (now in its fourth edition). He has served on the editorial boards of 36 journals in 10 fields, as well as being Editor of six, including two on microcomputers.

He is the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the 1986 American Evaluation Association [Page 388]Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award for contributions to evaluation theory, the 2001 American Evaluation Association Robert Ingle Award, the Policy Studies Association Donald Campbell Award as an “outstanding methodological innovator in public policy studies,” the Jason Millman Award for lifetime contribution to evaluation awarded by CREATE, and the McKeachie Award for lifetime contribution to faculty evaluation.