Brad Cousins, a professor in the Faculty of Education and co-director of the Centre for Research on Educational and Community Services, is the 2008 recipient of the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award for theory in evaluation. The award, presented by the American Evaluation Association (AEA), is given to an individual whose written work on evaluation theory has led to fruitful debates on the assumptions, goals and practices of evaluation. Cousins will receive his award on November 7, 2008 at the annual AEA conference, in Denver, Colorado. He is the first Canadian to receive the award.
Cousins is internationally recognized for his research on evaluation utilization and participatory evaluation. Currently, with colleagues and students from education, management and psychology, he is working on a research program funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which focuses on understanding organizational capacity to do and use evaluation. He is co-editing the Sage International Handbook of Educational Evaluation (forthcoming, 2009).
Nominator Michael Quinn Patton says, “Cousins looks at theory, research and practice (teaching, doing) as being highly interconnected, integrated and interdependent.”
“What makes this award so special,” says Cousins, “is that most of our work is empirical, which is somewhat uncommon in this relatively young field. It is also highly collaborative, and so my colleagues and students deserve credit too.”
Editor-in-chief of the Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation since 2002, Cousins is the co-developer and co-ordinator of uOttawa’s interfaculty Graduate Certificate in Program Evaluation, which confered its first ever certificates to 16 graduating students this fall.
