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continuation or for program improvement. The paradigm was weak for summative purposes, and of less use for formative decisions.

The implications for evaluators and evaluation sponsors increasingly committed to utilization of evaluation results were significant. Projects and programs could not be validly judged in isolation from the context in which they operated; nor did the implementation factors important to success lend themselves easily to modeling and quantification. Indeed, program implementation came to be seen as "... a complex, multi-stage process in which the phenomenon typically of interest to an evaluator -- the relationships between program inputs and system outputs -- is indirect and achieved against a noisy and constantly changing institutional setting." (McLaughlin, 1980: p. 13). Implementation is necessarily a heuristic process, one of learning and adjusting as opposed to a process of installation. Evaluation which fails to address these situational components will not develop information that has the immediacy and relevancy likely to be required by decision-makers.

Importantly, the earlier assumption that evaluations would lead to the identification of generalizable "truths" regarding the effects of educational interventions appeared untenable. The imprecise, evolving and site-specific nature of the implementation process meant that generalizations across many sites were risky. Moreover, even for a given site, evaluation findings, while useful at a given time, would decay as the program continued to evolve.

The direction in which evaluation models had to go was increasingly clear. Evaluation would become a tool for educational management, for both ongoing programs and the project-based interventions designed to improve quality. Formative evaluation designed to meet the information needs of decision-makers would be more useful than large-scale (particularly national) summative research- evaluation studies. These evaluations should take explicit account of context and process variables: this meant increasing attention to smaller evaluation studies at local levels. In the United States, this approach had the further potential advantage of generating information more quickly for use by the local decision-makers who indeed had influence over education programs. Such studies would be more likely to affect the choices of these decision-makers than large scale national studies which they believed, often correctly, did not necessarily apply in their local context.

Clearly, new models and methods of evaluation were needed to meet the new vision of the purposes of evaluation. In response to this need a - radically different approach to evaluation appeared. Known by various names -"qualitative," 'naturalistic' -- this model explicitly addressed the need to measure process and context variables. And while it has not been adopted as a replacement for the input-output paradigm, it has influenced the models and current practice of educational evaluation in important ways, combining with more traditional measurement approaches to lead toward current eclectic evaluation practice.

Qualitative Approaches: Qualitative evaluation can be most accurately described as endorsing a particular point of view, as opposed to