We often hear about monitoring and evaluation of projects and services; these activities, although not brand new, are still uncommon practices and can create misunderstandings and mistakes about their nature and aims.
If we look up the word "evaluation" in a dictionary we shall find different meanings: appraisal, rating, assessment, estimate, all implying a judgment. And in fact evaluation is a mental activity of comparison, research and analysis based on the collection and interpretation of information. It is connected with operational activities and its main aim is the possibility to modify processes and organizations of services.
Evaluation therefore helps decision making processes by reducing their complexity and providing elements to select the most adequate solution, according to the objectives of the programme or the service. It collects information, interprets it, expresses opinions, that can sometimes be pieces of criticism; but its purpose is never to judge people, let alone single operators.
As a research activity it is subject to a set of rules which are common to every scientific community:
- information collecting procedures must be clear, explicit and reproducible;
- collected information must be relevant, reliable and as complete as possible;
- interpretation must be consistent, convincible, and be made not through assertions but through argumentations open to confutation.
"Monitoring" is the systematic collection of data about a service or programme that shall be used at a later time for evaluation. Monitoring therefore has not the critical function of analysis and interpretation that characterizes the evaluation activity, although good, well-planned and farsighted monitoring is very useful to a correct evaluation (C. Bezzi, La valutazione dei servizi alla persona, www. valutazione.it).
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