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This article presents a model for the evaluation of educational innovation in a context of transformation. The model incorporates formative, summative and illuminative evaluation goals and emphasizes the need to locate the innovation which is being evaluated within the context and policy framework of its operation. The evaluation framework provided by the model takes into account the full range of variables impacting on innovative educational practice and subjects the innovation, along with its transforming educational context, to the scrutiny of evaluation. The article thus presents a 10-stage generalized evaluation model which can be used as a framework for the evaluation of any type of educational innovation. Each stage in this 10-stage evaluation process is expanded on, discussed in detail in the article and illustrated with examples from the evaluation of an innovative intervention at a tertiary institution in South Africa.

This paper is concerned with curriculum renewal in departments at a South African higher education and training institution with a career orientated focus. The driving forces for curriculum change derive, firstly, from government documentation which itself draws on aspects of the need for new knowledge workers in industry described by Gibbons et al in 1994. The features of such workers would be their ability to apply transdisciplinary knowledge in flexible ways to solve problems. Secondly, there is a need to retain students in the system and to help scaffold their learning through providing a workplace focus and fostering learning to learn skills. In an attempt to meet these needs co-operative staff groups were set up to design interdisciplinary, work-related tasks with associated explanatory and guiding criteria. In observingand talking to staff developing these tasks, difficulties were detected in working co-operatively, moving from evaluative to learner-support criteria, integration and allowing for more learner-centred control in assessment.

In this paper we study epistemological transitions across an intended engineering curriculum and recommend strategies to assist students in attaining the increasingly complex concepts and insights that are necessary for transition to advanced levels of study. We draw on Legitimation Code Theory [Maton, Karl. 2014, Knowledge and Knowers: Towards a Realist Sociology of Education. Abingdon: Routledge], in particular the dimensions of sematic gravity and semantic density, to explain these transitions. Data for the study was obtained from a curriculum renewal project that reveals how engineers understand engineering knowledge. We find an interdependent relationship between semantic gravity and semantic density in the intended engineering curriculum. The complexity of the context and the problems that arise from it pose strong cognitive challenges. The semantic gravity wave rises and falls across the engineering curriculum s, enabling both abstraction and a focus on ?real world? problems in specialised knowledge fields. Control of the semantic gravity wave is key to the provision of ?epistemological access? [Morrow, Wally, ed. (2003) 2009. Bounds of Democracy: Epistemological Access in Higher Education. Reprint, Pretoria: HSRC Press] to engineering knowledge.