The Evaluation of Management Education and Development: An Overview

Views about the nature and purpose of evaluation have developed quite dramatically over the last two decades. Unfortunately many peoples' expectations about what evaluation should be doing have not kept pace with these developments. In addition there has been a large amount of work carried out on the evaluation of general educational and social programmes, and much of this is both parallel to, and complimentary to, the evaluation of management training. This paper reviews recent trends in both fields using ideas from educational evaluation to clarify some of the problems encountered repeatedly in training evaluation and to suggest what might be more realistic expectations of evaluative activities.