Michael John Scriven (/ˈskrɪvən/; 28 March 1928 – 28 August 2023) was a British-born Australian polymath and academic philosopher, best known for his contributions to the theory and practice of evaluation.

Scriven was born in the UK and grew up in Melbourne, Australia. He held BSc (1948) and MS (1950) degrees in mathematics from the University of Melbourne, where he was in residence at Trinity College from 1946, winning an entrance scholarship. He then completed a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oxford (1956).

Scriven was a president of the American Educational Research Association and the American Evaluation Association. He was also an editor and co-founder of the Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation/. He was latterly a distinguished professor at Claremont Graduate University in California.

He spent most of his career in the United States. He became a full Professor at the age of 32. His major appointments were:

He was married to the feminist ethicist Mary Anne Warren. They had no children.

Scriven made significant contributions in the fields of philosophy, psychology, critical thinking, mathematics, and, most notably, evaluation theory and the establishment of evaluation as a transdiscipline. In 1971, he called for the replacement of 'goal achievement' in evaluation with the evaluation of whether a programme is able to meet the needs of its intended beneficiaries. "It seemed to me, in short, that consideration and evaluation of goals was an unnecessary but also a possibly contaminating step. I began to work on an alternative approach – simply, the evaluation of actual effects against (typically) a profile of demonstrated needs in this region of education." (1972, p.1)

Scriven's work in education influenced the work of many scholars, including that of Robert E. Stake, Ernest R. House, Benjamin Bloom, and Gene V Glass.

He wrote over 400 scholarly publications and served on the editorial review boards of 42 journals.