About Midge Smith

Dr. M. F. “Midge” Smith is an experienced evaluator with a notable record of publications; she has administrative experience at several levels within a university setting and now twelve years successfully directing TEI. She knows evaluation as a learner, as a teacher of academic and non-formal courses, and as a practitioner in many subjects (e.g. agriculture, education, medical/health).  Events that shaped her career in evaluation and led to the establishment of TEI and now the Center are:

1969.... Received first outside-funded project in the history of the University of Florida’s P. K. Yonge Laboratory School— about $1M in today’s dollars—to develop and test curricula for K-2, 3-5, and 6-8th grades; set up experimental and control sites in several counties. Frustrated with what she felt were, at the best, incomplete answers to the question of whether the curriculum was achieving success, she returned to school to study innovation and change.

1973-77.... Consulted with school systems in U.S. (K-12 AND HIGHER EDUCATION) on curriculum development and evaluation.

1978.... Accepted newly created position as Coordinator of Design and Evaluation in the six colleges plus teaching hospital of the University of Florida J. Hillis Miller Health Center.

1979....Joined UF College of Agriculture as Assistant Professor and Evaluation Specialist; taught program evaluation course and evaluated programs in Florida’s 67 counties.

1980... organized invitation-only national conference on Current Issues/Problems in Evaluating Cooperative Extension Programs; report from this session was noted for impacting evaluation guidelines formulated by the nationwide USDA/ES system. This same year, with UF colleagues, organized and taught the first formal evaluation training program in U.S. for Cooperative Extension faculty. This week-long program ran for six years.

1984... Secured external funds to describe and test a process called evaluability assessment, with field trials in five states, implemented iteratively for continuous learning, application, and testing. Evaluability Assessment (Kluwer, 1989) resulted from this research and was the
first book to describe step by step methods for conducting EA, and the first to recommend EA as a pre-program planning tool and as an evaluation tool in its own right.

1985... Moved to the University of Maryland College of Agriculture in newly created Coordinator of Program Planning and Evaluation role; later held administrative positions in the offices of the Director of Extension, and the Dean of the College.

1988.... Invited to be Editor of SEQ CHAPTER Evaluation Practice, (news magazine of the American Evaluation Association). Under her leadership, this publication became a peerreviewed
journal, abstracted/indexed in a number of professional sources.

1994.... She invited the top experts in evaluation to “take a turn at the crystal ball to tell how you think the future of evaluation will and/or should go.” Reflections of these 16, along with
Dr. Smith’s, resulted in the first published account of “the future of program evaluation” [EP, SPECIAL ISSUE 15(3)].

1995... She called on the top leaders in evaluation to strategize with her to find ways to improve the quality of evaluation work going on in the field. Six months later, The Evaluators’ Institute was born—the first entity of its kind in the world.

1996.... The first TEI program was held—to a full audience—on the Johns Hopkins University campus in Baltimore.

2004.... With help of key advisors, defined curriculum to establish the first Certificate Program for Professional Evaluators available entirely through off-campus short courses.

2005.... Started discussions with TEI faculty, other evaluation leaders, and three institutions of higher education about the optimum environment and set up within which TEI could flourish and where program evaluation could reach a height of development and influence to effect positive
change in the way public and nonprofit programs are understood and implemented …the Center for Evaluation Effectiveness at GW is the result of those discussions.