Peer Review of Submissions to the Annual American Evaluation Association Conference by the Graduate Student & New Evaluators Topical Interest Group

Peer review is an umbrella term that refers to a class of selection and oversight practices, including the familiar mechanisms of the review of proposals submitted for funding, of manuscripts for scholarly publications, and of personnel qualifications and portfolios for selection and promotion. Peer review has long been a cornerstone of modern scientific method premised on the assumption that those within a discipline are best suited to assess the work of others within that field. As such, it is also frequently employed to evaluate proposals submitted for professional meetings such as the annual conference of the American Evaluation Association (AEA). This paper presents a blind peer review method developed by AEA's Graduate Student & New Evaluators (GS&NE) Topical Interest Group (TIG) in an effort to construct an impartial and reliable process in proposal selection. Implications for conference review processes, AEA, and the field of evaluation in general are discussed. (Contains 2 tables and 1 endnote.)