Good practice in the evaluation of European cooperation projects

I refer here to the evaluation of European cooperation projects in the educational field funded by the European Union under programmes as the old Leonardo Da Vinci, Socrates or the recent Lifelong Learning programme.

Two important principles are the following:

1. The Evaluator has always to make clear which information he/she has been able to access. For example an evaluation report should always start with something like:

This report is based on the information collected by the Evaluator on the project meeting held in xx and zz (to which the Evaluator has participated), on the official documents produced by the Project up to … (date) and on the messages exchanged by the project partners in the project forum up to … (date). The Evaluator has not instead considered information from email messages exchanged directly by partners that are not listed in the project forum, to which he/she has not access.’

Clearly, the less the information available to the Evaluator, the more cautious should be judgment and suggestions by the Evaluator.

2. The Evaluator of European cooperation projects is not a judge in a tribunal. His/her task is not to assign rights and faults, but instead to analyze project events, to spot criticalities and to suggest possible solutions. Rights and faults are instead to be negotiated if necessary directly by the partners, because they have access to all project information and are legitimate in this by their role.

For these reasons the Evaluator will always avoid to side with one or more partners against others. When partners have different points of view, the Evaluator will simply signal them. For example the Evaluator will say: ‘Partner X affirms that ….. Partner Y instead affirms that …….’. Never the Evaluator will say ‘The Partner X is …. followed by an adjective such as: collaborative / un collaborative, supportive / unsupportive, willing / lazy, democratic / autoritarian, or similar.

Even when some problem is clearly due to a specific partner, the Evaluator will express him/herself impersonally. Not: ‘The project is two months late due to Partner X’, but rather ‘The project is two months late because work package 4 has ended two months later’.