Date: Friday, August 15, 2025
Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
I am Melissa K. Demetrikopoulos, Past-Chair of STEM Education and Training TIG, Director of Scientific Communications at the Institute for Biomedical Philosophy, and Lifetime AAAS Fellow for “distinguished contributions to evaluation of programs that enhance STEM diversity, undergraduate and graduate education.” The Institute for Biomedical Philosophy is dedicated to university support services and partnership development; and is very interested in evaluation and research processes specifically within an ethical framework that supports the development of a thriving community of practice.
Like many evaluators, the majority of our Institute’s evaluation work involves federally funded projects so we want to first acknowledge and sympathize with the larger research and evaluation community’s concerns/emotions/questions related to shifts in Federal priorities, uncertainty this has generated, and loss of revenue. I am hopeful we will unite to constructively maintain professional evaluation standards and support each other’s efforts in a collegial fashion rather than undermining one another as we struggle with these challenges.
We interviewed teachers about the COVID-19 shutdown including asking “What positive outcomes, if any, do you attribute to the shutdown…?” Almost every teacher has identified positive outcomes (e.g. knowing students, learning technologies, and planning collaboratively). So, no matter how drastic – or even potentially cataclysmic – these shifts may be, at some point, we will hopefully be able to look back with an optimistic perspective and identify positive outcomes.
One might imagine a positive outcome from changing Federal priorities to be more clearly articulated research and evaluation questions and recruitment methodologies. As we know, discrimination of protected classes (e.g. race, religion, and sex) is neither permitted by law nor ethical. As of this writing, “proxy discrimination” is also not lawful, so it is not permissible to choose a proxy for a protected class. Furthermore, renaming protected classes, or otherwise obfuscating target groups, is not likely to be a productive approach to answer intended questions or respond to federal requests. Yet, there are times when research or evaluation efforts necessarily focus on subpopulations of society in order to answer important questions. Some of this work is related to subpopulations who lack access to the same opportunities as others for either individual or systemic reasons. Perhaps refocusing efforts on differential opportunities (instead of membership within a protected class) and more clearly articulating goals and developing relevant (research and evaluation) questions will ultimately be more productive and impactful. For example, if a population is described by their opportunities (e.g. previously engaging in targeted STEM practices, easy access to advanced or honors courses, or experiencing poverty), these are not protected classes, nor proxies for protected classes, and likely more relevant to questions of interest. We should attempt to fully understand intents and goals of projects in order to develop processes to include all relevant participants and stakeholders in the evaluation. This shift in focus on inclusion, rather than exclusion, is likely to yield a more appropriate sample and richer data than one excluding individuals based on protected classes.
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.