Evaluation: Language, History and Geography

To assess the impact of the evaluation activities in Italian Universities and understand to what extent such institutions succeed in learning from their evaluation practices, this study exploited the annual Reports drafted by Evaluation Teams (Nuclei di Valutazione) and guidelines provided by the universities in their Charters (Statuti). The official documents of 33 Italian universities were collected in a large corpus including 57 Reports and 66 Charters with reference to two periods (pre/post D.M. 270/2004 for Reports and pre/post L. 240/2010 for Charters). Despite a general monotonous character of these texts and a forseeable similarity between documents drafted by the same institution, the analyses of textual data shed light on spatial variability (i.e., northern vs. southern universities), often stronger than time effects. Moreover, location showed interesting interactions with other variables, such as dimension (number of students) and complexity (number of faculties and courses). Results highlighted some universities that do not perform the evaluative commitment with the desirable belief but also a slow learning-process of a new awareness in evaluation subjects that is surprisingly well visible in the lexicon of these documents.