Chapter 8: Evaluation Concepts & Strategies
Developing Your Evaluation Plan
Developing Your Evaluation Plan
After many late nights of hard work, more planning meetings than you care to remember, and many pots of coffee, your community engagement effort has begun to take shape. You’ve explored and prioritized the issues that you intend to focus on, developed preliminary action strategies to address those issues, and worked hard to build the relationships and trust you will need to succeed. Congratulations! You have every reason to be proud.Â
Before going further, if you haven’t begun these discussions already, now is the time to outline your evaluation plans and the metrics that are most important to your initiative – including those of your stakeholders, partner(s) and convening organization(s). Evaluation is by far most effective not as an afterthought, but as an integral aspect of your engagement efforts – as early in the planning process as feasible.
When Should You Develop an Evaluation Plan?
As soon as possible – the earlier you develop a plan and begin to implement it the better your effort will be, and the greater the outcomes will be at the end.
Practice Tips
Here are a few benefits of developing a systematic and comprehensive evaluation plan:
- Guides you through each step of the process of evaluation
- Helps you decide what sort of information you and your stakeholders really need
- Keeps you from wasting time gathering information that isn’t needed
- Helps you identify the best possible methods and strategies for getting the needed information
- Helps you come up with a reasonable and realistic timeline for evaluation.
- Fosters program evaluation transparency to engagement stakeholders and decision makers
- Most importantly, it will help improve your engagement practice
Tools & worksheets
A Checklist to Help Focus Your Evaluation
A checklist, created by the CDC, to support you in crafting and assessing specific evaluation questions within a broader program or project evaluation.
Developing Your Engagement Plan
Guide and worksheet for developing an effective evaluation plan
Evaluations Questions Checklist for Program Evaluation
The purpose of this checklist is to aid in developing effective and appropriate evaluation questions and in assessing the quality of existing questions. It identifies characteristics of good evaluation questions, based on the relevant literature and our own experience with evaluation design, implementation, and use.
Additional resources
Developing a Logic Model: Teaching and Training Guide
This guide, written by Ellen Taylor-Powell, PhD and Ellen Henert, describes logic models and guides the reader through how to create and implement one. Contains many useful worksheets as appendices.
Phases of Data Analysis
This brief, written by Glenn D. Israel, covers the phases of data analysis for evaluation of an extension program.
Linking Extension Program Design with Evaluation Design for Improved Evaluation
Radhakrishna R, Chaudhary AK, Tobin D (2019) 3/16/2020 Linking Extension Program Design with Evaluation Design for Improved Evaluation, Journal of Extension 57(4).
Abstract: We present a framework to help those working in Extension connect program designs with appropriate evaluation designs to improve evaluation. The framework links four distinct Extension program domains—service, facilitation, content transformation, and transformative education—with three types of evaluation design—preexperimental, quasi-experimental, and true experimental. We use examples from Extension contexts to provide detailed information for aligning program design and evaluation design. The framework can be of value to various audiences, including novice evaluators, graduate students, and non-social scientists, involved in carrying out systematic evaluation of Extension programs.
Collecting Evaluation Data: An Overview of Sources and Methods
This brief, written by Ellen Taylor-Powell and Sara Steele, offers an overview of sources and methods in evaluation-related data collection, with a focus on extension.
Capturing Change: Comparing Pretest-Posttest and Retrospective Evaluation Methods
This brief, written by Jessica L. O’Leary and Glenn D. Israel compares two models of extension evaluation: “pretest-posttest” and “retrospective”.
Evaluation Models
In this monograph by Daniel L. Stufflebeam, the author reviews the dominant evaluation models used in the United States between 1960 and 1999 and argues which should be brought forward into the 21st century and which should be left behind.
Evaluability Assessment: Examining the Readiness of a Program for Evaluation
“The purpose of this briefing is to introduce program managers to the concept of Evaluability Assessment.”
Developing a Concept of Extension Program Evaluation
This brief offers an introduction to extension program evaluation and the many dimensions of its design and implementation.
Guiding Principles for Evaluators
This brief guide from the American Evaluation Association “can help you identify the basic ethical behavior to expect of yourself and of any evaluator”.
Developing an Effective Evaluation Plan: A guidebook
Developing an Effective Evaluation Plan. Atlanta, Georgia: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Office on Smoking and Health; Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity, 2011.
This guidebook, produced by the CDC, provides a framework laying out a six-step process for the decisions and activities involved in conducting an evaluation.