Promoting evaluation in socioeducational programs. An evolutionary practice

Abstract

The paper proposes a developmental, systemic and pedagogically informed model of evaluation to improve the educators’ work in residential childcare. Evaluation allows to value the socio-educational intervention at different levels (micro, meso and macro), focusing the experience of beneficiaries and professionals, the transformative capacity of a service seen as a complex system, and the possibility to evolve practices and policies within a growingly complex and diverse welfare system. Improvement of critical reflexivity, overcoming of dichotomies and methodological pluralism are proposed as antidotes to a reductive, linear and merely accounting vision of evaluation.