Mary E. Piontek is an assistant research scientist at the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor where she works with individual faculty, departments/units, and schools/colleges that need assistance designing program evaluation and assessing the effectiveness of initiatives to improve teaching and learning. She has considerable experience doing evaluation research in educational settings and has consulted with foundations, schools and districts, institutions of higher education, and private organizations on program evaluation and educational research issues. Her research and evaluation techniques capture the local context of an organization or program through individual and focus group interviews, in-depth participant observation, document and archival analysis, survey research, and qualitative/quantitative mixed designs. Her research interests include the changing roles of evaluators and their client/stakeholder relationships. She holds a B.A. and M.A. in English Literature and a Ph.D. in Measurement, Research, and Evaluation.
Hallie Preskill, Ph.D., is a Professor of Organizational Learning and Instructional Technologies at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. She teaches graduate level courses in program evaluation (introductory and advanced), organizational learning, consulting, and organization and training design, development, and delivery. She coauthored Evaluative Inquiry for Learning in Organizations (Preskill & Torres, 1999), Evaluation in Organizations: A Systematic Approach to Enhancing Learning, Performance & Change (Russ-Eft & Preskill, 2001), EvaluationStrategies for Communication and Reporting: Enhancing Learning in Organizations (Torres, Preskill & Piontek, 2004), and Building Evaluation Capacity: 72 Activities for Teaching and Training (Preskill & Russ-Eft, 2004). Preskill also coedited Using Appreciative Inquiry in Evaluation (Preskill & Coghlan, New Directions for Evaluation #100, 2003) and the Human Resource Development Review (Russ-Eft, Preskill & Sleezer, 1997). She has served on the Board of Directors of the American Evaluation Association and the Academy of Human Resource Development and is the section editor of the Teaching Evaluation column in the American Journal of Evaluation. She received the American Evaluation Association's Alva and Gunnar Myrdal Award for Outstanding Professional Practice in 2002 and the University of Illinois Distinguished Alumni Award in 2004. For over 20 years, she has provided workshops and consulting services in the areas of program evaluation, training, and organization development. She has also written numerous articles and book chapters on evaluation methods and processes, and has conducted program evaluations in schools and health care, nonprofit, human service, and corporate organizations.
Rosalie T. Torres, Ph.D. is President of Torres Consulting Group, an evaluation and management consulting firm that specializes in the feedback-based development of programs and organizations. Formerly, she was the Director of Research, Evaluation, and Organizational Learning at the Developmental Studies Center (DSC), an educational, nonprofit organization based in Oakland, California. She earned her Ph.D. in research and evaluation in 1989 from the University of Illinois. Over the past 27 years, she has conducted more than 60 evaluations in education, business, health care, and nonprofit organizations, holding both internal and external evaluator positions. She has authored/coauthored numerous books and articles articulating practice-based theories of evaluation use; the relationship between evaluation and individual, team, and organizational learning; and communicating and reporting evaluation findings. Among them are Evaluative Inquiry for Learning in Organizations (Preskill & Torres, 1999) and Evaluation Strategies for Communicating and Reporting: Enhancing Learning in Organizations (Torres, Preskill, & Piontek, 1996). She is a recent past Board Member of the American Evaluation Association, and served as the Staff Director for the 1994 revision of the Joint Committee's Program Evaluation Standards. She has taught graduate level research and evaluation courses at Western Michigan University and the University of Colorado (Denver and Colorado Springs campuses), and routinely conducts workshops on various topics related to evaluation practice.
