Date: Saturday, November 7, 2026
Hello, AEA365 community! My name is Akenten Dwamena. I am a doctoral student in Educational Leadership and a master’s student in Educational Measurement and Statistics at the University of Iowa, where I also serve as a Graduate Research Assistant at the Center for Evaluation and Assessment. Within the American Evaluation Association (AEA), I serve as Program Co-Chair of the Advocacy and Policy Change Topical Interest Group (TIG) and as a member of the AEA Awards Working Group.
As an emerging evaluator, I have learned that evaluation findings can change meaning after leaving an evaluation report. When findings enter policy briefs, legislative discussions, advocacy campaigns, or media stories, they are often simplified for broader audiences. This is sometimes necessary, but problems arise when important nuances disappear and claims become stronger than the evidence supports. The responsibility to communicate evidence carefully therefore continues beyond writing the report.
With this in mind, I offer three practical questions to help evaluators consider whether findings are accurately represented, relevant limitations acknowledged, and policy conclusions supported by the available evidence. These are reflections, not a formal framework.
1. What evidence is being presented, and does it accurately reflect the original findings?
An evaluation may identify an association, an implementation challenge, or a promising outcome. In policy debates, however, such findings may be presented as conclusive proof.
As a senior high school administrator with the Ghana Education Service, I observed improvements in examination pass rates alongside support measures, including free textbooks and additional classes offered at no cost to students. While encouraging, these improvements could not automatically be attributed to one intervention. Differences in student cohorts, attendance, or instructional practices may also have contributed.
Evaluators should therefore consider whether the claims being advanced align with the original findings, methods, scope, and stated limitations, and whether the degree of confidence communicated is consistent with the evidence itself.
2. What important evidence or limitations may have been left out?
Policy briefs and advocacy messages cannot include every detail. Yet omitting context can change how findings are understood.
For example, following Ghana’s Free Senior High School (Free SHS) policy, enrollment at the school where I worked rose from approximately 800 to 1,500 students, an 87.5% increase. This suggested expanded access to secondary education, but enrollment alone did not tell the whole story. Such figures attract attention, especially when the policy has attracted public interest. However, classroom capacity, teaching resources, student accommodation, and learning conditions also mattered.
Therefore, evaluators should ask whether policy claims reflect the original findings, methods, scope, and limitations, without overstating certainty
3. Would the claim still be held if the full evidence were considered?
This final question moves beyond factual accuracy to evaluative judgment. Some policy recommendations remain credible after limitations and uncertainty are acknowledged. Others become less convincing when competing explanations, context, and additional evidence are considered.
Evaluators should ask whether a policy conclusion remains defensible when all relevant evidence is considered and whether it goes beyond what the findings can reasonably establish.
Organizations such as Better Evaluation emphasize that policy influence occurs in complex environments where evidence is only one contributor among many. Similarly, efforts to strengthen evidence-informed policymaking increasingly focus on the quality and use of evidence, not merely its production.
For me, these questions offer a practical way to distinguish necessary simplification from potentially misleading representation. Producing credible evidence is only part of our work. When evaluation findings enter policy debates, do they still mean what we think they mean?
The American Evaluation Association is hosting APC TIG Week with our colleagues in the Advocacy and Policy Change Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our AP TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please do so using the form on our website. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.