Dr. Marvin Alkin

Biography

Marvin C. Alkin is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the School of Education and Information Studies. He joined the UCLA faculty in 1964 after receiving his doctorate from Stanford University. Dr. Alkin has held significant administrative roles, including Chair of the Education Department and Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. He is the founder and director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Evaluation and has received multiple awards from the American Educational Research Association (AERA) for outstanding evaluation reports within policy studies. He was the 1996 recipient of the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award for Lifelong Contributions to Evaluation Theory from the American Evaluation Association (AEA), and in 2016, he received the AEA’s Research Evaluation Award for significant contributions in the study of evaluation. Alkin has also served as editor and associate editor for several academic journals and is currently a co-editor for SAGE Publications’ Evaluation Practice Series. His extensive consulting work has led him to direct program evaluations for numerous national governments across 18 countries, where he is known for his research on the utilization of comparative evaluation theory. Alkin has published around 150 books, articles, and chapters, focusing notably on Context Sensitive Evaluation, which emphasizes understanding the factors in research literature related to high levels of evaluation use.

Research Interests

Awards