Metaphors can serve as powerful stimulants for clarifying purposes, roles, and practices in
program evaluation The metaphor proposed in this article is that the behavior of teachers
conducting small-scale evaluations of their own programs is analogous to the behavior of
students solving curriculum-specific problems in classrooms, and that teaching methods
for training students in problem-solving skills can be usefully adapted to training teachers
in evaluation skills. The metaphor focuses attention on the construct of evaluation
frameworks and on strategies for externally representing evaluation frameworks. A
growth scheme and training strategy are empirically developed with evidence from three
related case studies
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