E Jane Davidson

Dr Jane Davidson returned to Aotearoa New Zealand from the United States in 2004, where she served as Associate Director of the internationally recognised Evaluation Center at Western Michigan University. There, she launched and directed the world’s first fully interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Evaluation, spanning WMU's Colleges of Arts & Sciences, Education, Engineering & Applied Sciences and Health & Human Services. 

Jane is author of Evaluation Methodology Basics: The Nuts and Bolts of Sound Evaluation (2004, Sage Publications), which is used internationally as a graduate text and practitioners’ guidebook. She hosts a popular blog with Professor Patricia Rogers (RMIT) on Genuine Evaluation and is also coeditor (with Drs. Michael Scriven and Chris Coryn) of the free-access online Journal of Multidisciplinary Evaluation.

In 2005, Jane was recipient of the American Evaluation Association’s Marcia Guttentag Award, awarded to a promising new evaluator within five years of completing their doctorate.

She has presented keynote addresses for the UK Evaluation Society, the New Zealand Association for Impact Assessment, the Arizona Evaluation Network, the Healthy Eating Healthy Action (HEHA) Research, Evaluation and Monitoring conference, and the Education Review Office’s national conference.

Jane is Director of Real Evaluation Ltd., an Auckland-based evaluation consulting firm. Current and recent projects include facilitated self-evaluation and capacity building, evaluation training and development, independent evaluation, formative and summative meta-evaluation (advice, support and critical reviews of evaluations).

Her clients include the Ministries of Education, Health, and Economic Development; Te Puni Kōkiri (Ministry of Māori Development); Education Review Office; State Services Commission; New Zealand Qualifications Authority; Leadership Development Centre; Environment Waikato; MASH Trust; Cancer Society; and Kamehameha Schools in Hawai`i. She has also delivered successful public evaluation workshops for The Evaluator’s Institute, the American Evaluation Association, the Aotearoa New Zealand Evaluation Association, the University of South Africa and the Knowledge Institute.

Jane received her PhD from Claremont Graduate University (California) in organisational psychology with substantial emphasis on evaluation, her MA in psychology from Victoria University of Wellington, undergraduate degrees in psychology and chemistry from Massey and Canterbury universities respectively, and a Diploma of Teaching from the Christchurch College of Education.