PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - C F Macdougall TI - Evaluation – the educational context AID - 10.1136/adc.2008.142240 DP - 2010 Feb 01 TA - Archives of disease in childhood - Education & practice edition PG - 28--32 VI - 95 IP - 1 4099 - http://ep.bmj.com/content/95/1/28.short 4100 - http://ep.bmj.com/content/95/1/28.full SO - Arch Dis Child Educ Pract Ed2010 Feb 01; 95 AB - Evaluation comes in many shapes and sizes. It can be as simple and as grounded in day to day work as a clinical teacher reflecting on a lost teaching opportunity and wondering how to do it better next time or as complex, top down and politically charged as a major government led evaluation of use of teaching funds with the subtext of re-allocating them. Despite these multiple spectra of scale, perceived ownership, financial and political implications, the underlying principles of evaluation are remarkably consistent. To evaluate well, it needs to be clear who is evaluating what and why. From this will come notions of how it needs to be done to ensure the evaluation is meaningful and useful. This paper seeks to illustrate what evaluation is, why it matters, where to start if you want to do it and how to deal with evaluation that is external and imposed.