Stakeholder Involvement in Educational Evaluation

Québec’s Commission d’évaluation de l’enseignement collégial

Abstract

The introduction of program evaluation in Quebec’s junior colleges — known as CEGEPs or Collèges d’enseignement général et professionnel — has followed two general principles. Those called to participate in evaluation are asked to specify the objectives of the programs being evaluated. The Quebec college teaching evaluation board, the Commission d’évaluation de l’enseignement collégial (CÉEC), proposes that all who have active roles in the management or teaching of the CEGEP programs should participate in evaluation. The evaluation process should be both results-oriented and participative. Those who should be most involved in the evaluation exercise — the CEGEP teachers — have for the most part refused to participate. This is explained, according to the CÉEC, by the “new and ill-defined nature of the task.” However, the CEGEP teachers are also perceived as being resistant to evaluation, which the CÉEC evaluators hope will change over time. In the evaluation of the Day Care Education Program, for example, the evaluators focused primarily on the objectives of the full-time diploma (DEC) programs rather than on those of the part-time (AEC) programs. As a result, the evaluation failed to identify some of the real problems of the AEC programs. It is argued that a theory-driven approach to evaluation would be more successful in dealing with the AEC programs’ problems. A bottom-up approach would have mobilized more stakeholder involvement than the top-down approach actually employed.