Evaluation Capacity Development for Educational Development: Case Study of the Policy-level Evaluations of Japan’s ODA in the Education Sector

Education policies and systems have been experiencing increasing pressure to show greater accountability and effectiveness (OECD, 2007). In Japan, under the School Education Law and the Government Policy Evaluation Act, thousands of evaluations are conducted at various levels of education and educational administration every year. If the results are not used, there would be limited meaning in doing evaluation. In order to strengthen the use of evaluations, the quality of evaluations needs to be enhanced to meet stakeholders’ needs. The study used meta-evaluation of Japan’s educational cooperation policies to understand how evaluation results are used and what factors are hindering. Japan’s new education cooperation policy states that Japan provides support in light of “Japan’s strengths in its education system,” which have still been vaguely understood. To create evidence to clarify “Japan’s strengths in its education system” is expected role of evaluation. The conceptual framework for administering and using evaluations, as well as some thoughts about its potential uses and applications should be developed by providing research on evaluation with practical case studies to improve quality of evaluations and evaluation results.