Curriculum Vita

Claude F. Bennett

Program Evaluation and Planning Consultant

From 1964-1971, Bennett held teaching and research positions at the University of Kentucky and the University of Arizona. He spent 1971 to 1994 with Extension Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), except for a 1980-1981 appointment with USDA's Science and Education Administration. Bennett worked as Program Evaluation and Planning Leader, in the Plant and Animal Systems Unit of Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (CSREES), from 1995 through 2001. His work in USDA included the following:

·	designing, managing, and co-authoring national as well as multi-state program evaluations plus promoting their use by program leaders, administrators, policy makers, and other stakeholders;
·	developing and managing systems to report extension program plans and accomplishments, as well as co-authoring national publications based on these systems’ outputs;
·	designing, managing, and promoting the use of national studies of interrelationships among extension and research functions, and publishing and promoting the use of conceptual models of generic roles of and programmatic collaborations between research and extension;
·	developing, publishing, and teaching--at the national, state and county levels-- models and methods for planning and evaluating collaborative extension and research programs; and
·	publishing articles on rationale for public funding of individual agricultural extension programs and issues in the development of systems for planning and reporting on national programs.

In 2000-2002, Bennett headed a multi-unit, multi-agency team that completed evaluation of a nationally-distributed magazine of USDA's Small Farm Program. During the 1990's, Bennett managed and co-authored an evaluation of USDA’s multi-agency Water Quality Demonstration Projects as well as an assessment of Cooperative Extension’s National Water Quality Initiative. For this Initiative he guided submission, review, quality control, and analysis of all state/territorial project plans and accomplishments.

During the 1970's and 1980's, Bennett evaluated and managed evaluations of extension programs to promote renewable natural resources, human nutrition, youth development, and community and rural development.

Bennett has published articles in domestic and international professional journals as well as in conference proceedings, in the fields of extension education, program evaluation, water quality programming, farming systems research and extension, sociology, and public health. He also has authored U.S. Department of Agriculture publications and co-authored state university publications. His publications have been used widely as evaluation guides in the U.S. and in numerous other countries, leading to evaluation training consultancies in Australia (1999) and Canada (2001).

Bennett has been twice honored, in 1988 and in 2000, by Extension Evaluators of the American Evaluation Association (AEA), for sustained excellence in extension evaluation and outstanding leadership in this field. He has served on the Board of Directors, Extension Evaluators, AEA.