Suchergebnisse

La evaluación es una empresa lucrativa y un perfil profesional al que muchos se han sumado careciendo de las mínimas competencias y conocimientos exigibles. Evaluar es emitir juicios de valor sobre objetos diversos, incluidas las iniciativas de intervención social. El planteamiento convencional es racionalista (diagnóstico, planificación, intervención y análisis del impacto), a pesar de que los modelos racionalistas hayan perdido vigor en las ciencias sociales a favor de alternativas políticas, simbólicas o caóticas, tal como apreciamos en la historia del pensamiento organizacional. En una perspectiva construccionista, observamos además el poder reificador de los criterios escogidos en cada situación de evaluación. La evaluación sugiere o impone qué es lo correcto en cada caso; criterios que pasan a acotar, dar sentido y prioridad a determinado modo de entender las relaciones sociales, los objetivos o el modo de comportamiento personal y organizacional. Mi propuesta es elevar esta inevitable consecuencia práctica de las evaluaciones a rango de virtud política y ética, al servicio de los intereses y deseos de futuro de los grupos que participan en procesos evaluativos, primando su función estratégica sobre las tradicionales funciones de mejora y rendición de cuentas. ; "Testing" and "evaluating" are money-making activities that offer a rewarding professional career; perhaps it is no surprise that the field includes numbers of self-styled "evaluators" who provide services without the required training. Evaluation means the systematic application of given criteria for judging the merit or value of a variety of 'assessables' - capacities, powers and services, including social policy interventions. The conventional perspective is rationalist (in diagnosis, planning, intervention and impact analysis), even though rationalism have lost their pre-eminence in the social sciences, in favour of political, symbolic or chaotic alternatives, as the history of organizational thought reveals. Alternatively, from a constructionist perspective, we see the power of evaluation criteria to reify what they ostensibly assess. Evaluations suggest or impose what is right; criteria of value define, give meaning and prioritize just one way of understanding social relations, program goals or individual and organizational behaviour. The suggestion in this article is to make a positive virtue of this inevitable pragmatic consequence of evaluation: to openly embrace it as an agent of change, emphasizing a strategical function beyond the traditional purposes of enhancement and accountability.

La inseguridad ciudadana y el miedo al delito son uno de los tópicos de investigación más frecuentes en la literatura actual sobre estudios urbanos. La abundancia de estudios empíricos exige una reflexión teórica profunda que abra nuevas vías de trabajo e integre los resultados que parecen aceptados entre la comunidad de investigadores. En este artículo, expondremos seis hipótesis o marcos teóricos que podrían resultar relevantes para este fin. Acudo a la teoría social urbana en busca de ideas, desde los autores clásicos del siglo XIX hasta las nuevas propuestas narrativas posmodernas. La conclusión apunta hacia el mayor potencial de los marcos ecológico y narrativo.

Evaluation as a discipline has just started to take hold in Spain, especially since the nineties. More and more research centres, independent consultants, professionals and scholars are devoted to these tasks. However, we lack a unified body of knowledge, there is no shared vision of what evaluation is, nor is there a professional profile recognized by society or even by ourselves. Entry of unqualified persons in the profession is a tangible reality, with many supposed evaluators whose training is limited, in the best of cases, to a specific course, or certain personal experience as participants (not technicians) in some evaluation process, generally in an accreditation system.

URBS. Journal of Urban Studies and Social Sciences is born with the intention of becoming a 'new viewpoint' of cities worldwide. Our perspective implies a clear commitment regarding the exchange of complex and multiple knowledge around urban studies in social sciences, but also in other technician and creative fields of inquiry originally and worthy interested in contemporary cities. In sum, we propose an interdisciplinary and multilingual space which intends to promote a conscious reflection about thematic topics committed scientifically, ethically and politically with theoretical innovation and epistemological renovation in Social Sciences.

This article compares the influence of evaluation in two different public education contexts. One evaluation was knowledge-focused, with the evaluators acting as external judges in a context of top-down changes at post-implementation stage in infant and primary schools. The other was development-focused from a constructivist perspective in a context of bottom-up changes during the building of a shared model in a university administration department. The effects of the former were limited to the impact of disseminating scientific information. The latter evaluation had several effects, many of them indirect and diffuse. The main source of influence was participative discussion about evaluation procedures and their results. The advisability of participative evaluation to support system changes and model construction is discussed. The authors also suggest that the concept of influence be considered in the broad sense so different types of influence (multidirectional, indirect, unintended, non-instrumental) can be included as an evaluation impact.

The Bologna process of European convergence assigns evaluation a key role, as a system for quality assurance of grades, in order to increase the mutual trust among different national education systems. However, current evaluation models neither have been revised to include such a legitimistic perspective, nor have assumed the criteria for internationalization included in the official goals of Bologna declarations. The paper describes, through the opinion of academic staff, a metaevaluation of the evaluation system of grades used in the Andalusian universities. A questionnaire was administered to 81academics, chosen because of their previous experience as members of self-evaluation committees. . The questionnaire included 82 criteria for judging the quality of evaluation stages and key elements. Results show the valued characteristics that any evaluation system should fit. Academics have a certificationist conventional perspective over evaluation, rejecting a political alternative perspective and the opportunities added by evaluation in supporting the efforts of internationalization and European convergence. ; El proceso de convergencia iniciado en Bolonia asigna un papel clave a la evaluación, como garante de la calidad de los títulos, para asegurar la confianza mutua entre los distintos sistemas educativos nacionales. Sin embargo, los modelos de evaluación no han sido revisados para incluir esta perspectiva legitimista, y tampoco se han incluido los requisitos que exige la internacionalización asumida en las declaraciones ministeriales como objetivo deseable del cambio universitario. En este artículo, se presenta una metaevaluación del sistema de evaluación de las titulaciones universitarias andaluzas, a través de la opinión del profesorado. Fueron entrevistados mediante cuestionario un total de 81 profesores con experiencia como miembros de comités de autoevaluación de las titulaciones. El cuestionario se compone de 82 criterios con los que se juzga la calidad del proceso de evaluación a lo largo de todas sus fases y elementos clave. Los resultados se interpretan como las características y valores deseables que debería cumplir el sistema de evaluación. Sugieren la existencia de una perspectiva certificacionista y convencional en el modo de entender la evaluación por parte del profesorado, obviando las posibilidades de un planteamiento político y las oportunidades que brinda para apoyar el proceso de internacionalización y convergencia europea.