How “Beauty” Can Bring Truth and Justice to Life

Abstract

Abstract Quantitative evidence is the “bones,” qualitative evidence is the “flesh,” and evaluative reasoning is the “vital organs” that bring them both to life. True “beauty” in evaluation is a clearly reasoned, well‐crafted, coherent evaluation story that weaves all three of these together to unlock both truth and justice with breathtaking clarity. This chapter provides tips for delivering truly accessible, assumption‐unearthing, values‐explicit evaluation that clearly lays out: (a) a set of high‐level explicitly evaluative questions to frame and focus the work; (b) the justice principles and other values applied in order to answer them; (c) the criteria and evidence that demonstrate performance relative to those principles and values; and (d) the evaluative reasoning used to arrive at robust conclusions about not just what has happened but how good, valuable, and important it is.