There are many opportunities for students to get involved at Evaluation 2010!
Student Volunteer Opportunities: AEA welcomes full-time students interested in volunteering at Evaluation 2010. Student volunteers work a 4-hour shift and receive a waived conference registration. Volunteer signups for Evaluation 2010 are now available at http://archive.eval.org/eval2010/10students.vol.htm.
Type I Awards: Deadline Passed April 15, 2010. AEA will award up to ten $500 travel awards to full-time students to offset their conference attendance costs. The awards will be competitively chosen and awardees will share their submissions at the conference.
Details of the Type I Awards: This year’s program theme is Evaluation Quality. In his 1980 book, Evaluating with Validity, Ernest House discusses truth, beauty, and justice as standards for evaluation quality. The truth standard has to do with the credibility of the argument underlying the evaluation conclusions and the extent to which the conclusions stand up to rational discourse. House describes the beauty standard as involving authenticity, form, coherence, and imagery. Finally, for the justice standard, House identifies the values of equal treatment and equal rights, respect, impartiality, and reciprocity. The truth and justice standards are expressed to some extent in the AEA Guiding Principles for Evaluators, but the beauty standard is less frequently addressed. It is the topic of the student award submissions.
Content and format: Describe how beauty can promote credibility and/or justice in evaluation. We welcome presentations that creatively use evaluation concepts, issues, and case examples (hypothetical or actual) to illustrate your response. Presentations can be in any form that can be easily transmitted electronically. Up to three minutes in video, music, photo, graphics, or other media formats may be submitted, or if you choose to write an essay, the text portion – including appendices etc - should be no more than 3 double-spaced pages, 12 point font, 1 inch margin, although graphics may extend this length.
Reading Evaluating with Validity is not essential for success with the presentation, but clicking here will take you to three relevant chapters if you want additional background.
If submitting multimedia, it must be able to be sent electronically either directly via email or via email with a link to where the presentation may be found online. The key is that regardless of format it must (a) be easily transmitted (careful about file size), viewed and reviewed, and (b) be clear as to what the presentation is. As an example, you should not send 20 separate pictures where we could not tell the order or discern the meaning, rather in this instance, you might create a slideshow with voiceover and send us a link to access the slideshow. Similarly, if you send us to a website, be sure that you link directly to your presentation. If you direct us to something you have uploaded on YouTube, in your cover email note whether you envision your presentation being the YouTube video itself or you would be presenting live what we see on the YouTube video. Please note that during the conference, there is no internet access in the conference rooms, so in order to make your presentation you will need to be able to have any needed media on a laptop.
If you are sending an attachment as your submission, attach it to your email noted in item 1 as a single attached file, by midnight in the Eastern time zone in the United States on Thursday, April 15, 2010.
All submissions will be confirmed via a return email by noon on the next workday following your submission. Please do not check on submissions prior to noon the following day.
Students selected to receive a Type I travel award will be notified on or before July 7, 2010.
Type II Awards: Deadline Passed March 19, 2010. Up to six $500 travel awards are available to full-time students submitting conference proposals for papers identifying ways to increase the racial/ethnic diversity of people entering the field of evaluation and/or ways to increase the cultural competencies of evaluators more generally. All students may compete for these scholarships; however, special consideration will be given to students who themselves will increase the racial/ethnic diversity of presenters at the conference. Proposals that do not win will be reviewed as part of the general pool of proposal submissions.
Submit the proposal itself by the March 19, 2010 deadline using the regular conference proposal submission guidelines and forms available online by clicking here. Select “Multiethnic Issues TIG” as the group to review your proposal. Only proposals that focus on the issues stated above will be considered.
Students selected to receive a Type II travel award will be notified on or before July 7, 2010.