Evaluability Assessment

Evaluability assessment was thrust on the evaluation scene in the 1970s and was initially thought to show great promise for improving programs and saving valuable evaluation resources that might have been wasted by evaluating programs that were not ready to be evaluated. After a short burst of interest and activity, the process appears to have lost much of its appeal among evaluators. This entry provides a definition of evaluability assessment and offers some conjectures as to why a tool with such demonstrated promise seems to have all but disappeared from the practice of evaluation—at least as the practice is described in published literature.