Quaderni di comunità. Persone, Educazione e Welfare nella società 5.0

The challenges and opportunities of evaluation: from theory to practice.

This thematic Special Issue aims to collect contributions focused on evaluation, in various sectors such as education, training and labour, with reference to both the policies defined and implemented at national, regional and local level and by the stakeholders involved, as well as the operational declinations and practices.

The topic of policy evaluation occupies an important role in the national and European agenda. With the awareness that it is possible to decline “evaluation” into specific activities that respond to different logics, this thematic edition aims to focus on what is common, i.e. the final objective: acquiring knowledge useful for finalizing the planning of future policies and actions.

If the evaluation activity responds to a constant need of knowledge, the question of the availability of resources and the contextual increase, particularly in some policy areas, of the number of interventions to be implemented, has made more and more pressing the need to acquire useful information, in order to better allocate the available resources, after having analyzed the quality of the interventions and the tools used for their implementation.

The centrality that the evaluation question is assuming, in increasingly differentiated areas of the country's life, the existence of multiple ways of understanding evaluation and the presence of even very heterogeneous practices, stimulate interest in the topic and make it the object of attention in many disciplinary fields.

This edition aims to collect both contributions with a theoretical approach and contributions with analysis of experiences in the fields of interest, with both qualitative and quantitative approaches.