Faculty presents at the American Evaluation Association

Arthur E. Hernández, Ph.D., professor of Education at the Dreeben School of Education, presented “A Discussion of the Meaning of and Differences Between Trait, State and Emergent Diversity: Implications for Practice” held on Oct. 27 at Eval20 Reimagined: A Virtual Experience, an annual conference of the American Evaluation Association.

The American Evaluation Association is an international association of approximately 7,300 members dedicated to the application and exploration of program evaluation, personnel evaluation, technology and other forms of evaluation.

“I wanted people to take away from my session the importance of examining the literature for guidance regarding diversity focused activities and recognizing and accounting for trait, state and emergent diversity considerations in planning, implementation and evaluation,” said Dr. Hernández.

“This session reflects the consensus that key mediators exist which influence the diversity-performance relationship which in turn are subject to key moderating influences,” he said. “However, in practice most activities related to the diversity of teams seems to conflate or ignore the distinction between stable diversity attributes and compositional variables and does not begin to consider the dynamic relationship between diversity and teams over time.”

Dr. Hernández is a nationally certified school psychologist and counselor, a diplomate of the American Board of Psychological Specialties and is a licensed psychologist, and licensed specialist in school psychology. He currently serves on the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation, a Canadian/American standards organization which represents a coalition of major professional organizations. Dr. Hernández has and continues to contribute to funded research, service and teaching projects as principal investigator, co-investigator, evaluator or consultant.