An Interpersonal Skills Learning Taxonomy for Program Evaluation Instructors

Abstract

Anyone who trains others in the practice of program evaluation should be aware of how necessary it is for the practitioner to maneuver the interpersonal dynamics within a program evaluation setting. This paper discusses why interpersonal skills are an invaluable tool for any program evaluator, which interpersonal skills are most important, and how instructors can integrate these skills in classroom activities and assess student learning. In fact, how instructors choose to use interpersonal skills as an objective in their program evaluation classrooms influences the level of skill development acquired by the student. This work merges a combination of Dreyfus and Dreyfus’s (1980) five-stage skill development model and Glaser’s (1983) behavioral approach with Bloom et al.’s (1956) taxonomy of cognitive learning objectives to construct a taxonomy of interpersonal skill competence for program evaluators that bridges the gap between theory and practice.