The need for and frequency of program evaluations has increased during the past two decades. Professionals involved with program evaluation have expressed dissatisfaction with the minimal impact evaluation information has had on program planning and decisions. Therefore, researchers have begun to investigate factors contributing to varying degrees of evaluation usefulness. This study focused on an evaluation utilization model which predicted that evaluator, decision maker, program and context, and report and process variables affected the impact of an evaluation. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of certain evaluator and decision maker characteristics on the usefulness of a program evaluation;A simulated evaluation report was written by the researcher, then read by decision makers and rated by the decision makers in terms of evaluator quality, number of uses, usefulness of the information and process of the evaluation, and overall usefulness or impact;The subjects were 80 junior or senior high school principals or assistant principals. The researcher administered the treatment materials under standardized conditions to 10 small groups of administrators;Ordinary least squares regression and a path analytic technique which adjusts for measurement error and provides a test for the overall fit of the model to the data (LISREL IV) were used to analyze the data. The LISREL results indicated that neither the original, nor the three revised models, fit the data well. However, several predictor-criterion relationships support specific areas of the proposed theoretical model. These findings led to recommendations to evaluators and decision makers as to how they can improve evaluation utilization, as well as to suggestions for further research.