A new institutional review turns Evaluation of Evaluation's own audit method on the program that invented it, under convenor Dr Dagny Okafor.
The School of Continuous Improvement's meta-review program opens a review of its own five-yearly cycle, convened by Dr Dagny Okafor
The School of Continuous Improvement’s Evaluation of Evaluation program has spent its opening years turning that same instrument — the audit — on the University’s other review panels, meta-audits, and quality cycles. This teaching period the program turns it on itself, opening a review of its own five-yearly review, convened by Dr Dagny Okafor.
A program built to ask what a review actually changes owes itself the same question eventually. Better we ask it than wait for somebody else to.
— Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation
Dr Okafor’s own research distinguishes what a meta-audit re-certifies from what it genuinely changes; the self-review borrows the same distinction, with a panel drawn from within the program’s own membership standing in for the outside reviewer the program doesn’t otherwise have. The School frames the exercise as evidence the program’s method travels wherever it is pointed, rather than an exception made for itself.
“It would be a strange kind of methodologist who exempted her own program from the question she puts to everyone else’s,” said Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, welcoming the review. “The interesting part is whether the answer changes anything.”
The review is expected to report within the current teaching period; its panel and terms of reference are to follow.