Smith, M. F.

(b. 1942, Altha, Florida). Ph.D. University of Maryland, College Park; M.Ed. University of Florida, Gainesville; B.S. Mississippi State University.

Smith is Professor Emerita, University of Maryland, and Director of the Evaluators' Institute (based in Delaware). She previously held faculty positions in the Colleges of Education, and Agriculture, University of Florida. She has directed evaluations in a variety of fields; for example, medicine and health, parks and recreation, agriculture, nutrition, family finance, youth development, public K-12 education, and university academic instruction.

[Page 391]Her interest in evaluation began in 1970, when she directed a project for the University of Florida Laboratory School to develop and test curricula for kindergarten through eighth grade. This project involved an evaluative component to determine whether the programs worked. However, at that time, evaluators were not available, only statisticians. As a result, Smith returned to school, studied research and evaluation, and began her career as an evaluator. Primary influences on her early evaluation work include Michael Scriven, Dan Stufflebeam, Michael Patton, Don Campbell, James Sanders, Robert Boruch, Lee Sechrest, and others.

Smith has contributed in many ways to the field of evaluation. Her work on evaluability assessment translated the concept to a set of practical methodological steps that built on the work of Wholey, Kay and Nay, Schmidt, and others. In 1984, Smith initiated a project to define the practical and methodological aspects of the EA process and to encourage its adoption in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's State Cooperative Extension Services. Through her work with five different state extension services, the methodology was refined and resulted in the publication of Evaluability Assessment: A Practical Approach (Kluwer, 1989).

She served on the Board of Directors of the American Evaluation Association for 10 years and is past Editor of Evaluation Practice (now the American Journal of Evaluation). It was under her leadership that this publication moved from a focus on “news” to become a peer-reviewed journal abstracted and indexed in a number of professional sources. She co-edited the American Journal of Evaluation's special issue on the future of the evaluation profession and is also Editor of the Profession of Evaluation section of The International Handbook on Educational Evaluation. She organized a national symposium on evaluation in state Cooperative Extension Services, whose attendees formed the first AEA TIG, Extension Education Evaluation. She is the recipient of the 1994 Robert Ingle Award for Service from the American Evaluation Association. Smith has served on a number of national committees, notably the Government Auditing Standards Advisory Council, which was responsible for revising the U.S. General Accounting Office Government Auditing Standards.

In 1996, with the help of 20 national leaders in evaluation, she began The Evaluators' Institute™, an AEA-endorsed training institute that enables practicing evaluators to acquire evaluation knowledge and skills. More than 2100 different individuals from 49 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and 65 countries and U.S. territories have studied evaluation topics over the course of the Institute's programs.