Researchers and research organizations are under increasing pressure to demonstrate that their work contributes to positive change and helps solve pressing societal challenges. There is a simultaneous trend towards more engaged transdisciplinary research that is complexity-aware and appreciates that change happens through systems transformation,…

"Cases Integrating Ethnography and Evaluation" examines the connections between ethnography and evaluation in educational spaces, wrestling with pressing justice and equity issues in today's societies across the world. The book provides readers from different disciplines and practice areas with detailed accounts of evaluation and…

Australia's state-based public sector standing anti-corruption commissions each have an education function. The function is underpinned by a largely unquestioned assumption that integrity education will reduce levels of misconduct and corruption in the public sector. This study explores how these commissions undertake evaluations and publicly…

Social labs have recently been gaining traction in a wide range of sectors internationally, and have been applied to many complex social problems, including food system security, poverty and labour market revitalisation. Social labs convene participants to collaborate and work collectively on developing prototypes that are iteratively refined and…

Education is a transformative force with the potential to reshape socio-political structures, promote equity, and drive social progress. However, in Pakistan, elite capture presents a significant challenge to the education system, spreading disparities and restricting access to quality education by marginalised communities. Therefore, our…

Pressing social problems and inequities call attention to the need for interventions that target root causes and change systems. A significant challenge facing system change efforts is the lack of systems-based evaluation theory and methods. To address this challenge, we conducted an instrumental case study of evaluation within an exemplary…

Civic engagement is recognized as a critical process to address environmental and other societal issues. To examine the intersection between environmental education and civic engagement, as reported in the peer-reviewed literature, we undertook a systematic mixed studies review to identify environmental education program outcomes related to civic…

Despite political and rhetorical pronouncements of a reduction in racism, growing inequity in U.S. society continues to feature race as a prominent fault line with no evidence of reduction on the horizon. Of significant concern is the degree to which inequity among racially identified subgroups of the population link to policies and practices of…

Over the last years, "El Sistema" has been enthusiastically received around the world and has inspired several proposals aiming to transplant it to different contexts in different countries. It would seem, then, that "El Sistema" constitutes a renewed approach that allows a place for inclusive music education within the…

The field of Adult Literacy and Numeracy (ALN) has an evidence problem. This paper analyses that problem through the lens of three overarching types of evidence available to researchers and policymakers: Type 1 evidence, which provides descriptions of the scope of social problems; Type 2 evidence measuring the impacts of programmes addressing…

Governments across the West have invested significant resources in preventing radicalization, and strategies to prevent and counter violent extremism (P/CVE) are increasingly prominent within wider counter-terrorism policies. However, we know little about their effects, especially about projects that utilize former extremists to counter extremist…

This article describes how Extension professionals and university faculty collaborated on the planning, implementation, and evaluation of a conference to address a key societal issue. Needs assessment and evaluation results are presented as well as an explanation of how results were used in planning future conferences. With limited Extension…

This article reports on a two year project in which educational psychologists offered consultation to groups of teachers, to help them find solutions to school-based problems. Teachers were drawn from within individual schools and from across a number of schools. Typically, teachers were trained by educational psychologists in group consultation…

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) Environmental Literacy Program (ELP) Community Resilience Education Theory of Change communicates the overarching philosophy guiding its grants program. It can also be used to inform project-level logic models, ensuring that a project's activities, outcomes, and goals are aligned with the…

The most pressing social problems facing humanity in the 21st century are what systems theorist Russell Ackoff referred to as "messes"--complex dynamic systems of problems that interact and reinforce each other over time. In this article, the authors argue that the lack of progress in managing messes is in part due to the predominance of…