CHAPTER FOURTEEN COMMUNICATING RESULTS TO DIFFERENT AUDIENCES

With its focus on serving the information needs of intended users (Joint Com-mittee on Standards for Educational Evaluation, 1994), evaluation is a fun-damentally practical form of inquiry. This emphasis on practicality places a high premium on effective communication among all the people involved in an eval-uation, including those conducting the study and those who will use the infor-mation it generates. Indeed, as evaluation approaches have proliferated (Stufflebeam, 2001), so has the potential for misunderstandings about the ex-pectations and assumptions underlying a particular evaluation project, making the need for accurate, balanced, and clear communication stronger than ever. This chapter is about the communication of evaluation results—an area that experience shows can frequently be neglected or devalued. Communication of results is sometimes viewed as a procedurally routine phase of the evaluation process that involves drafting and distributing a report, possibly accompanied by a meeting or oral presentation. Furthermore, many evaluation reports follow the template of a research paper, in which background, hypotheses, techniques