Marvin C. Alkin

Marvin C. Alkin (born 1934) is a Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Alkin joined the UCLA faculty in 1964 after receiving his doctorate from Stanford University. He has, at various times, served as Chair of the Education Department and Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. He was founder and former Director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Evaluation.

He has received multiple awards from the American Educational Research Association (AERA) for outstanding evaluation reports and policy studies. In addition, he is one of only four people to receive both of the major scholarly awards of the American Evaluation Association (AEA). In 1996, he was the winner of the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award for Lifelong Contributions to Evaluation Theory from AEA. In 2016, he received the Association’s Research on Evaluation Award for significant contributions to the study of evaluation.

He has been editor or associate editor of eight academic journals, including the Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis Journal, Evaluation Review, and Studies in Educational Evaluation. He also was executive editor of the Encyclopedia of Educational Research (6th Edition). He is currently co-editor of SAGE Publications’ Evaluation in Practice Series.

Alkin has been a consultant to numerous national governments and has directed program evaluations in 18 different countries. He is especially noted for his extensive research on evaluation utilization and comparative evaluation theory. His resume includes well over 150 published books, articles and chapters.

He is noted for his work on Context Sensitive Evaluation, an approach derived from an understanding of factors found in the research literature that are associated with high levels of evaluation use.