The paper examines the "knowledge" produced by one of the groups of power in the network that created policies of evaluation of brazilian higher education. It studies the regime of truth that produced a discourse about the emancipatory conception of evaluation. That is, with reference to Foucault: the set of rules for regulating production, distribution, circulation and functioning of discourses. The research is based in papers published in the Revista Avaliação, by members of Network of Institutional Evaluation of Higher Education (Raies), in the period 1996-2002 and it is complemented with interviews with group members. It is concluded that the network has developed and instituted a discourse about formative evaluation as: institutional, educational and participatory. They developed their concepts and created a theory about that conception of evaluation. This concept was put forward as an alternative and opposition to National Examination of Courses establishing a dichotomy between two conceptions: formative evaluation and control evaluation.
Evaluation of higher education; Conceptions of evaluation; Revista Avaliação; Network of Institutional Evaluation of Higher Education - (RAIES)