Evaluator Skill Acquisition

This article presents the results of a survey conducted in an attempt to examine evaluators’ perceptions of the contributions that different educational experiences make to the development of their evaluation skill sets. Self-identified new and graduate student evaluators were asked to describe their evaluation training experiences and to indicate how important each experience was to the development of particular evaluation competencies. A paired-comparison analysis was conducted to determine the scaling of the contribution each educational experience made to the development of each competency. Results show that the perceived contribution of different training experiences changes depending on which evaluation competency is being developed. Pedagogical implications of these findings are also discussed.