This article uses the story of a multi-year project conducted in four countries in east central and southeastern Europe to illustrate the challenges faced by an evaluator working in a social, political, and cultural context different from her own. Situations involving divergent expectations and unexpected events created circumstances where the evaluator had to shift roles and approaches to ensure the evaluation could remain on course. The evaluation was deemed problematic at various stages of implementation and more successful at other times.

This article gives a brief description of school improvement in Canada over several decades and describes the difficulties — conceptual, technical and communicative — associated with evaluating school improvement.

The purpose of this article is to explore, through an extensive review and integration of recent scholarly literature, the conceptual interconnections and linkages among developments in the domains of evaluation utilization, evaluation capacity building, and organizational learning. Our goal is to describe and critique the current state of the knowledge base concerning the general problem of integrating evaluation into the organizational culture. We located and reviewed 36 recent empirical studies and used them to elaborate a conceptual framework that was partially based on prior work.

The evolution of the Manitoba School Improvement Program's (MSIP) approach to evaluation as a means of building schools' capacity for continuous improvement will be described from the perspective of tile MSIP evaluation consultant. and in the context of the difficulties inherent in secondary school reform.