Educational Evaluation TIG Week: Is Your Evaluation as Place-Based as the Program? by Jenna LaChenaye

Date: Thursday, November 12, 2026

Bonjour/Hi, AEA! I’m Jenna LaChenaye, Associate Professor of Educational Psychology and Research within the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s School of Education and Human Sciences.  I’ve had the immense pleasure of serving as an evaluator for dozens of place-based programs focused on building resilience and community scientists across the Louisiana Gulf coast.

These programs are deeply rooted in place: students typically study land loss, storm protection, ways of being in the wetlands, and major issues affecting the land that we and our culture reside in. The programming of these studies is rich in local inclusion…then an evaluation arrives with a generic pre/post template that could be dropped into any school in any state. For many of these, the program is place-based, but the evaluation is placeless.

Hot Tips

• Ask what the program claims is local. If the theory of change says students will understand their wetlands, a test of wetlands concepts that transfer anywhere measures only half of it. Add items, tasks, or prompts that require local knowledge.
• Widen what counts as evidence. Student notebooks, maps, drawings, arts-based approaches, and teacher reflections show how learners connect to a place in ways a multiple-choice item can’t. Plan to analyze them from the start, not as an afterthought.
• Match the timeline to the outcome. Sense of place, stewardship, and civic agency rarely shift in a single unit. If your design only allows a pre/post window, say plainly what it can and can’t detect.

Lessons Learned

• Place-based education treats students and teachers as holders of local knowledge. Evaluation should too, which means asking them what matters and not only what they retained.
• In communities facing real environmental loss, “whose place is this?” is an evaluation question. Who defines success, who interprets the findings, and who gets the report back?
• Small, rural, place-specific samples are the norm, not a flaw. Mixed methods and honest reporting of limits make small-n work credible.
• If your evaluation instruments wouldn’t make sense to someone in the community, ask whether they measure anything the community values.
• Never underestimate the value of local, culturally-informed evaluators.

Rad Resources

• Sobel’s Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms and Communities (2004), for the core principles.
• Gruenewald’s “The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place” (Educational Researcher, 2003), on what place-conscious learning is supposed to accomplish.
• The Equitable Evaluation Framework, for questioning whose values shape the evaluation.

The American Evaluation Association is hosting Educational Evaluation TIG Week with our colleagues in the Educational Evaluation Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our Ed Eval 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 send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. 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.