The Evaluation Checklist Project: The Inside Scoop on Content, Process, Policies, Impact, and Challenges

According to Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, a checklist is, simply, “a list of things to be checked or done. ” Michael Scriven has identified and analyzed several types of checklists: laundry lists, sequential checklists, iterative checklists, diagnostic checklists, and criteria of merit checklists. But regardless of focus, purpose, or complexity, all checklists share in common a basic mnemonic function: they remind (or inform) us what we are supposed to do, check, look for, etc. (Scriven, 2000, ¶ 2) Shortly after we 1 set up the Evaluation Checklists Web site, 2 I read a chapter by Ernest House and Kenneth Howe (2000) on their Deliberative Democratic Evaluation Model. In concluding the chapter, they wrote that the principles upon which the model is based—inclusion, dialogue, and deliberation—“are too important to leave to chance or intuition all the time. ” They continued, “It may help to have a justification and checklist to remind evaluators caught in the complexities of difficult evaluations what evaluation in democratic societies should aim for ” (p. 421). The point here is that many aspects of evaluation are “too important to leave to chance or intuition all the time. ” And this is why even the lowly laundry-list-type checklist can be extremely useful in the complex world of evaluation