Michael graduated from the University of Melbourne with an honors degree in mathematics, and the philosophy of mathematical logic at the University of Melbourne. Scriven’s doctorate is from Oxford university.

During his illustrious career, he has taught in the United States and Australia in the departments of Mathematics, philosophy, psychology, the history and philosophy of science and education. He taught at Berkely for 12 years. Scriven has held fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavior Sciences, the Center of Advanced Study in Theoretical Psychology, and the Educational Testing Service (Princeton), the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, the National Science foundation, and as a Whitehead Fellow at Harvard University. He has authored over 330 publications, in the research areas of critical thinking, technology studies, computer studies and evaluation. He has been on the editorial board of 42 journals and has edited a number of them. He is a past president of the AERA, and has received the American Evaluation Association’s Lazarsfeld Medal for contributions to evaluation theory. He has received many grants (too many to name) and serves as consultant on numerous projects.

Currently Scriven is the director of the Federal Project on teaching evaluation models, and AERA Evaluation Fellow at the National Science Foundation, and a member of the federal panel reviewing evaluation of all federal funded education projects. He is also conducting an evaluation of the Marin County School District restructuring projects.

There are a number of interesting online interviews with Dr. Scriven from Thinking Allowed Productions, a part of the Intuition Network, on Thinking about Thinking and Explanations of the Supernatural. The interviewer describes Michael Scriven as “probably one of the most eminent philosophers in the world today....a very logical man...certainly one of the most outstanding thinkers that I’ve encountered...” Admittedly, Scriven has spent “a lot of time working on the question of how you do try to improve the degree of rationality with respect to decisions that call for it.” Scriven argues that cultivating the irrational is a matter of where an when, and often cultivating the irrational and emotional is a luxury that we can ill afford.”

Scriven developed an evaluation approach known as the Formative-Summative approach which is a contrast to Stufflebeam’s CIPP model and Stake’s Countenance approach. Scriven defined evaluation as the systematic an objective determination of the worth or merit of an object, an said this definition could best be implemented by engaging an independent evaluator to render a judgment of an object based on the accumulated evidence about how it compared with similar objects in meeting the needs of consumers. Scriven (1970) charged that the CIPP model was flawed due to the fact that it almost totally ignored the fundamental role of summative evaluation, due to its (CIPP) preoccupation with fostering improvement (p. 123, Models and Conceptualizations).

Interestingly, Scriven and Stufflebeam debated the differences of their models of evaluation in a number of settings (the AERA commissioned them to co-direct and team-teach four traveling training institutes. “Through these contracts, I became convinced that our different views of evaluation were more apparent than real and that they mainly reflected different perspectives and experiences. In my work with the Columbus schools, an orientation towards a final, externally-based judgment of worth would have been stifling and nonresponsive to the staff's need for guidance toward “shaking down” and improving their projects (Stufflebeam, Models and Conceptualizations).

PUBLICATIONS, BOOKS & MONOGRAPHS

Authored or Co-Authored

The Gas Turbine in Automobile Design, Minnesota, 1956 (co-authored with Wm Moncrieff)

Psychology , ed. Allen Calvin, Allyn & Bacon, 1960 (co-authored college text; two chapters authored were on Scientific Method, and Statistics)

Computers and Comprehension, RAND monograph, April, 1964 (early study of the reasons for the failure of the U.S. Air Force computer translation program)

Applied Logic: An Introduction to Scientific Method, Behavioral Research Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA, 1965 (programmed high school text)

Primary Philosophy , McGraw-Hill, 1966 (reprinted six times through 1988). Selections reprinted in Modern Critical Readings in the Philosophy of Religion , ed. P. Angeles, Basic Books, 1970; and in Philosophy of Religion , Wadsworth, 1986.

Philosophy of Science , NETCHE, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1970 (handbook written as a guide to a series of video-taped lectures for the Nebraska Eductional Television Consortium)

Evaluation: A Study Guide for Educational Administrators , Nova University, 1974

Reasoning , Edgepress, January, 1976. Reprinted June, July and December, 1976. Publication assumed by McGraw-Hill 1977 and since reprinted several times. (Second edition scheduled for publication in 1997)

Evaluation Thesaurus , first edition co-authored with Jane Roth, Edgepress, April 1977. 3rd edition (sole author), 1982, reprinted 6 times. Fourth edition Sage, 1991

The Evaluation of Composition Instruction , with B. Davis and S. Thomas, Edgepress (for the Carnegie Corporation), 1981. Second edition 1987 (Teachers College Press, Columbia University)

The Logic of Evaluation , Edgepress, November, 1981

How to Buy a Word Processor: Electronic Typewriters, Personal Computers, and Dedicated Systems  (with Steven Manus). Booklet, 62 pages. Alfred Publishing Company, 1982

Word Magic: Evaluating and Selecting Word Processing, 282 pages. Wadsworth and van Nostrand, 1983. Translated into Russian, published with permission, Soviet State Publishing House, Moscow (1987).

Critical Thinking: Its Definition and Assessment,  November, 1997; xiv + 236 pages; Edgepress and the Centre for Research in Critical Thinking