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Clara Hagens on Guidance on Monitoring and Evaluation
No comments · Posted by Sheila Robinson in Uncategorized
I’m Clara Hagens. I work for Catholic Relief Services (CRS) as the Regional Technical Advisor for Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning in Asia. I’d like to share with you a guidance document we have developed to support project teams to operationalize monitoring and evaluation (M&E) plans, big and small, in various contexts.
Rad Resource: CRS’ Guidance on Monitoring and Evaluation covers a range of topics related to basic M&E concepts and to designing and implementing M&E activities. The topics include gender in M&E, random and purposeful sampling, developing qualitative data collection tools, M&E in emergencies, and community participation in M&E to name a few. Each topic is grounded in a set of standards to guide our M&E practice. The standards are accompanied by narrative to explain how each can be achieved, tips and good practices, examples, and planning tables and templates.
For example, the Guidance provides standards for Community Participation in M&E that state that M&E systems track the changes most important to communities and communities participate in data collection and in the interpretation of M&E results and includes tips for each step in the process. The standards for Planning and Conducting an Evaluation refer to the importance of developing project-specific evaluation questions related to the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact and sustainability. The Guidance also includes a simple evaluation planning table which helps teams to link the methods for data collection and respondents to the evaluation questions.
The CRS Guidance on Monitoring and Evaluation is appropriate for project teams who are looking for additional hands-on support to further engage with their M&E systems. I hope you will find this useful!
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.
commune · evaluation questions · Monitoring and Evaluation · sustainability
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Susan Kistler on Changes Afoot at the American Evaluation Association
No comments · Posted by Susan Kistler in Uncategorized
Changes are afoot! My name is Susan Kistler and I am just about to become the American Evaluation Association’s Executive Director emeritus. I’ve written before about my stepping down and my last official day in this position is this coming Monday, May 20. I’ll continue to write for aea365, and will be working on the Evaluation 2013 conference program, but will be moving on to new and exciting opportunities and serving AEA primarily in a volunteer capacity. The new staff team coming on board brings a breadth and depth of knowledge of management and communications that represents a significant increase in AEA’s organizational capacity. I can’t wait to see what new things come about in the months ahead.
Rad Resource – Denise Roosendaal: AEA is searching for a permanent Executive Director (see the position description here). In the meantime, Denise Roosendaal, CAE, is the interim ED and may be reached at droosendaal@eval.org. Denise brings to the position twenty-five years of experience in running nonprofits and associations and she can’t wait to get to know more about AEA and evaluation. If you are attending the Summer Institute next month in Atlanta, be sure to stop by the registration desk and to say “hello.”
Lessons Learned – What to Expect: You likely won’t see major changes in AEA’s programs and services in the near-term and only improvements in the long-term. aea365 will continue to come out daily under the watchful eye of Sheila Robinson, our lead volunteer curator (she may be reached at aea365@eval.org). The association will have a new phone number (1-202-367-1166) but the old one will forward until the end of June. There will be new voices on the other end of the phones, but with the same commitment to serving AEA. We ask that you are patient in the next few weeks as the new staff gets up to speed. If they don’t know the answer, they’ll find it and get back to you expeditiously.
Get Involved – Share Your Ideas: Have a great idea for something new for AEA? Email Denise at droosendaal@eval.org or put it in the comments on aea365.
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.
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AKEN Week: Vanessa Hiratsuka on Continuous Quality Improvement, Quality Assurance, Evaluation, and Research: Where does my project fit?
No comments · Posted by Sheila Robinson in Indigenous Peoples in Evaluation
Hello, I am Vanessa Hiratsuka, secretary of the Alaska Evaluation Network (AKEN) and a senior researcher at Southcentral Foundation (SCF), a tribally owned and managed regional health corporation based in Anchorage, Alaska, which serves Alaska Native and American Indian people.
As part of Commitment to Quality, a key organizational value, Southcentral Foundation (SCF) prioritizes continuous quality improvement (CQI), quality assurance, program evaluation, and research.
Although the strategies and tools used in CQI, quality assurance, program evaluation, and research are similar, we do different things. One of our challenges is to help staff across the organization understand who does what. Because these four fields differ in aim and audience, exploring the goals of a project (aim) and who will use its findings (audience) provides a useful framework to determine where a project fits.
At SCF, improvement staff work directly with SCF department and clinic processes to develop and implement project performance measures and outcome indicators as well as help staff (audience) improve processes to better meet customer-owner needs and inform business directions (aim). Quality Assurance staff conduct quality monitoring to ensure programs are complying (aim) with SCF processes and the requirements of our accrediting bodies (internal and external audiences).
SCF internal evaluators measure programs’ performance (aim) and provide feedback to programmatic stakeholders — including staff, leadership, and funders (audience). The SCF research department’s projects address questions of clinical significance to contribute to generalizable knowledge (aim) for use within SCF and for dissemination in the scientific literature around American Indian and Alaska Native health (audience).
Lessons Learned:
- Define the aim and intended audience early in the process! This helps identify the stakeholders, level of review, and oversight needed during all stages of a project, including development, implementation, and dissemination of findings.
- Broadly disseminate findings! Findings and recommendations from all disciplines are only useful when they are shared. At SCF, findings are shared at interdivisional committee meetings and with staff who oversee the work of departments. Multipronged dissemination ensures involvement from all levels of SCF and supports innovation and the spread of new knowledge.
- Project review can be complicated! At SCF, research projects must be vetted through a tribal concept review phase, an Institutional Review Board review, and finally a tribal review of the proposal. Later, all research dissemination products (abstracts for presentation, manuscripts, and final reports) are also required to undergo a tribal research review process. These take time, so it is important to understand the processes and timelines and build review time into your project management timelines.
Check out these posts on understanding evaluation:
- 1. Gisele Tchamba on Learning the Difference between Evaluation and Research
- 2. John LaVelle on Describing Evaluation
The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Alaska Evaluation Network (AKEN) Affiliate Week. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from AKEN members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.
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AKEN Week: kas aruskevich on Strengthening Itinerant Evaluations in Rural Alaska
No comments · Posted by Sheila Robinson in Collaborative, Participatory and Empowerment Evaluation
Greetings! My name is kas aruskevich and I am principal of Evaluation Research Associates LLC. I live in Fairbanks and work primarily in rural Alaska. Alaska is known for its great natural beauty, extreme temperatures, and unique context of diverse and far-flung communities assessable only by air. Alaska is the largest state in the U.S.
Rural communities often have a small population and rarely have a local evaluator for hire. Consequently, a program evaluator is most often hired from outside the community or region. Helicopter evaluation is a depreciating term used to describe a drop in – evaluate – depart approach. Today’s post talks about methods to strengthen and add depth to evaluations that involve distance between evaluator and evaluand.
Hot Tip: First, context is important. Familiarize yourself with the community and region before you travel. Gather demographic data of the community, leading industry, and cultural composition. Learn about the organization hosting the program, before your first contact. Plan your site-visit around a community event so you can see the community in a broader context.
Rad Resource: The importance of context is discussed in New Directions for Evaluation Fall 2012, Issue 135.
Hot Tip: Next, work to build open communication with program staff. Begin with a teleconference to provide an opportunity to meet staff and organization and discuss program status. Teleconferences also give you a chance to describe your evaluation style and see if you are a ‘fit’ for the organization and the evaluation project.
ALWAYS include participatory methods. I don’t ‘come in’ as the expert with an unchangeable evaluation design, but instead write up suggestions for the evaluation to negotiate before a plan is finalized. As an itinerant evaluator you can’t be on site as often as you might like. Using a participatory evaluation approach, program staff can be involved in the evaluation through taking photos or identifying program participants or stakeholders to interview.
Rad Resource – Read more about participatory evaluation in Cousins and Chouinard’s new book Participatory Evaluation Up Close.
Hot Tip: Lastly, work to build a friendly relationship based on mutual interests with at least one person in the organization or community. After years of conducting evaluations, friendly relationships have evolved into continuing friendships. These friendships have mutual benefits, in-part, they are a bridge for the evaluator to learn community specific cultural protocols–very important to conduct evaluations in cross-cultural settings – which in turn can strengthen the program through appropriate evaluation.
Lesson Learned: Itinerant evaluation can be much more than a helicopter site-visit approach. Regular communication and working together with program staff as a team can expand the evaluative evidence collected and increase report credibility, relevance, and use by the program staff.
The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Alaska Evaluation Network (AKEN) Affiliate Week. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from AKEN members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.
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AKEN Week: Alexandra Hill and Diane Hirshberg on Mixed Methods for Small Sizes and Culturally Responsive Practice
No comments · Posted by Sheila Robinson in Mixed Methods Evaluation
We are Alexandra Hill and Diane Hirshberg, and we are part of the Center for Alaska Education Policy Research at the University of Alaska Anchorage. The evaluation part of our work ranges from tiny projects – just a few hours spent helping someone design their own internal evaluation – to rigorous and formal evaluations of large projects.
In Alaska, we often face the challenge of conducting evaluations with very small numbers of participants in small, remote communities. Even in Anchorage, our largest city, there are only 300,000 residents. We also work with very diverse populations, both in our urban and rural communities. Much of our evaluation work is on federal grants, which need to both meet federal requirements for rigor and power, and be culturally responsive across many settings.
Lesson Learned: Using mixed-methods approaches allows us to both 1) create a more culturally responsive evaluation; and 2) provide useful evaluation information despite small “sample” sizes. Quantitative analyses often have less statistical power in our small samples than in larger studies, but we don’t simply want to accept lower levels of statistical significance, or report ‘no effect’ when low statistical power is unavoidable.
Rather, we start with a logic model to ensure we’ve fully explored pathways through which the intervention being evaluated might work, and those through which it might not work as well. This allows us to structure our qualitative data collection to explore and examine the evidence for both sets of pathways. Then we can triangulate with quantitative results to provide our clients with a better sense of how their interventions are working.
At the same time, the qualitative side of our evaluation lets us lets us build in measures that are responsive to local cultures, include and respect local expertise, and (when we’re lucky) build bridges between western academic analyses and indigenous knowledge. Most important, it allows us to employ different and more appropriate ways of gathering and sharing information across indigenous and other diverse communities.
Rad Resource: For those of you at universities or other large institutions that can purchase access to it we recommend SAGE Research Methods. This online resource provides access to full text versions of most SAGE research publications, including handbooks of research, encyclopedias, dictionaries, journals, and ALL the Little Green Books and Little Blue Books.
Rad Resource: Another Sage-sponsored resource is Methodspace, an online network for researchers. Sign-up is free, and Methodspace posts selected journal articles, book chapters and other resources, as well as hosting online discussions and blogs about different research methods.
Rad Resource: For developing logic models, we recommend the W.K. Kellogg Foundation Logic Model Development Guide.
The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Alaska Evaluation Network (AKEN) Affiliate Week. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from AKEN members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.
affiliates · culturally responsive evaluation · logic models · mixed methods
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AKEN Week: Alda Norris on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Extension Evaluation in Alaska
No comments · Posted by Sheila Robinson in Extension Education Evaluation
Greetings from the Last Frontier. I’m Alda Norris, webmaster for the Alaska Evaluation Network (AKEN) and evaluation specialist for the University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension Service (CES).
The faculty and staff I work with at CES are experts in a variety of fields, from horticulture, entomology and forestry to economics, nutrition and child development. That adds up to quite an interdisciplinary organization! Our diversity makes for fantastic collaborations, as well as complicated syntheses. Lucky for me, my PhD is in interpersonal communication, which applies across the board.
Lessons Learned: Ask people to tell you the inspiration behind their projects. Every group has a story to tell.What common goals bring these people together?Inquiring about the “why” and not just the “what” of a program really benefits capacity building efforts. I got to know CES better while writing a Wikipedia entry. Hearing and reading about the contributions Extension has made in Alaska since the 1930s deepened my understanding of what led up to each of our program’s current priorities and logic models.
- Help yourself with history. Too often we are mired in a static view of where an organization is now, rather than having an appreciation for how it has changed, and continues to change, over time. Even in a “young” state like Alaska, there is rich historical data we can learn from.
- Boost your evaluation planning by gathering information on your/the client organization’s “story” from a variety of sources. Talk to emeritus professors, compare the org chart of today to past decades, and comb through newspaper archives. Becoming familiar with past waves of change is very helpful in understanding the meaning behind current missions, goals and structures (and people’s attachments to them).
Hot tip: Communicate about communication! Add a question about communication preferences to your next needs assessment. Don’t assume you know what level of technology and form(s) of interaction your colleagues and clients are comfortable with. Before you do a survey, figure out what modes of communication the target population values. For example, if oral history is a large part of a sample group’s culture, how well will a paper and pencil form be received?
Rad Resources:
- The National Communication Association (NCA) can help you step up your message design game. Take advantage of free advice from experts on verbal and nonverbal communication by reading NCA’s newsletter, Communication Currents.
- AnyMeeting is a freetool that you can use to reach a wider audience. With it, you can host online meetings and make instructional videos, both of which are really handy when working in a geographically diverse setting. AnyMeeting also has screenshare clarity in its recordings that Google Hangouts lacks.
The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Alaska Evaluation Network (AKEN) Affiliate Week. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from AKEN members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.
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AKEN Week: Amelia Ruerup on Understanding Indigenous Evaluation in an Alaskan Context
1 Comment · Posted by Sheila Robinson in Indigenous Peoples in Evaluation
Hello! My name is Amelia Ruerup, I am Tlingit, originally from Hoonah, Alaska although I currently reside in Fairbanks, Alaska. I have been working part-time in evaluation for over a year at Evaluation Research Associates and have spent approximately five years developing my understanding of Indigenous Evaluation through the mentorship and guidance of Sandy Kerr, Maori from New Zealand. I consider myself a developing evaluator and continue to develop my understanding of what Indigenous Evaluation means in an Alaska Native context.
I have come to appreciate that Alaska Natives are historic and contemporary social innovators who have always evaluated to determine the best ways of not only living, but thriving in some of the most dynamic and at times, harshest conditions in the world. We have honed skills and skillfully crafted strict protocols while cultivating rich, guiding values. The quality of our programs, projects, businesses and organizations is shaped by our traditions, wisdom, knowledge and values. It is with this lens that Indigenous Evaluation makes sense for an Alaska Native context as a way to establish the value, worth and merit of our work where Alaska Native values and knowledge both frame and guide the evaluation process.
Amidst the great diversity within Alaska Native cultures we share certain collective traditions and values. As Alaska Native peoples, we share a historical richness in the use of oral narratives. Integral information, necessary for thriving societies and passing on cultural intelligence, have long been passed on to the next generation through the use of storytelling. It is also one commonality that connects us to the heart of Indigenous Evaluation. In the Indigenous Evaluation Framework book, the authors explain that, “Telling the program’s story is the primary function of Indigenous evaluation…Evaluation, as story telling, becomes a way of understanding the content of our program as well as the methodology to learn from our story.” To tell a story is an honor. In modern Alaska Native gatherings, we still practice the tradition of certain people being allowed to speak or tell stories. This begs the question: Who do you want to tell your story and do they understand the values that are the foundation and framework for your program?
Hot Tip: Context before methods. It is essential to understand the Alaska Native values and traditions that are the core of Alaska Native serving programs, institutions and organizations. Indigenous Evaluation is an excellent approach to telling our stories.
Rad Resource: The Alaskool website hosts a wealth of information on Alaska Native cultures and values. This link will take you to a map of “Indigenous Peoples and Languages of Alaska”
The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Alaska Evaluation Network Week. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from AKEN members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.
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AKEN Week: Corrie Whitmore Introducing the Alaska Evaluation Network
No comments · Posted by Sheila Robinson in Uncategorized
I’m Corrie Whitmore, president of the Alaska Evaluation Network (AKEN) and an internal evaluator working for Southcentral Foundation (SCF). SCF is an Alaska Native owned and operated health care organization serving approximately 60,000 Alaska Native and American Indian people living in Anchorage, the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, and 60 rural villages in the Anchorage Service Unit. SCF has had program evaluation in-house since 2009. We are a small department with two evaluators, so it is important for us to build our skills and keep up to date with changes in evaluation practice by staying engaged with the American Evaluation Association (AEA) and local evaluation practitioners.
The Alaska Evaluation Network (AKEN), which is a great resource for all Alaskans interested in evaluation, was founded in 2012 with an emphasis on improving the quality of evaluation research, theory and practice in Alaska and creating forums for dialogue, relationship–building, learning, and collaboration.
Alaska offers a unique environment for evaluation. According to the 2010 census, we have 730,000 people spread over an area larger than Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona combined. Population density is low, some communities are only accessible by airplane or boat, and many evaluators work in tribal contexts. Building a community of practice encourages AKEN’s members to support evaluation practices that are responsive to the uniqueness of Alaska’s geographic, social, cultural, and administrative context; encourage effective evaluation; improve evaluation capacity within the state; and advocate for evaluation leadership.
AKEN’s goals are to: increase the understanding of evaluation’s purpose and use in Alaska; build evaluator and organization capacity around evaluation approaches, methods, and cultural competency; promote evaluation as a profession; and support the contribution of evaluation to the generation of theory and knowledge about effective human action in Alaska and the circumpolar north.
To date, AKEN has more than 50 members spread from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Southern California (spanning 3000 miles). This geographic dispersal is a strength – we are committed to including evaluators across the state and those living elsewhere who work in Alaska – and a challenge. To address that reality, all of our meetings have a teleconference or web conferencing option, meeting minutes are posted to our website, and much business is done by email.
Lessons Learned: Connecting with other evaluators in your region can enrich your work and support capacity building. While it would be great to sit across the table from each other, it can be just as valuable to connect using technology!
Get Involved: by joining AKEN or your own local affiliate. These groups are online at the AEA Affiliate List. If your area doesn’t have an affiliate yet – start one! We’d be glad to share our experience with you.
The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Alaska Evaluation Network (AKEN) Affiliate Week. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from AKEN members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.
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Susan Kistler on the AEA/BetterEvaluation Webinar Series and Making the Most of YouTube
1 Comment · Posted by Susan Kistler in Integrating Technology into Evaluation, International and Cross-cultural Evaluation, Teaching of Evaluation
I am Susan Kistler, the American Evaluation Association’s Executive Director and aea365’s regular Saturday contributor.
Guess what just moved into the #1 spot for the most read aea365 article of all time? The April 6, 2013 post announcing the collaboration with BetterEvaluation to produce a series of publicly available Coffee Break Webinars! We’re well under way with the webinar series focusing on the RainbowFramework for planning, managing, and implementing an evaluation, and I want to share an update:
Hot Tip – Sign Up to Attend the Remaining Offerings Live: There are still six more webinars to go in the series, to be offered every Tuesday and Thursday through until the end of May. If you attend live, you have an opportunity to raise questions at the end, and to hear directly from the presenters. Register for the remaining free webinars here – note that you must register for each one separately.
Hot Tip – Subscribe to AEA’s YouTube Channel and Check Out the First Webinar in the Series: The recording of the first webinar in the series is already available online. Go to http://www.youtube.com/user/AmEvalAssn and click the Subscribe button just below the header to receive notices as each subsequent recording is posted.
Hot Tip – We’re having each of the videos in the series professional transcribed: The transcription is useful in at least four ways: (1) it enables reading the video content for those who may have hearing limitations, (2) it allows viewers to read along in case the video’s audio is not perfect or the viewer is more comfortable with written rather than spoken English, (3) it allows for easily extracting references and written quotes from the video, and (4) it serves as the basis for improved translation to other languages.
Cool Trick – Automated Translation Is Available and Human Translations Are Coming: You can select “Translate Captions” (see the screenshot below) and Google will create a machine translation of the captions and transcript. Working from a professional transcription improves the quality of the machine translation, but the quality is still quite variable. I am excited to announce that we are working with a team of volunteers to translate this video series into multiple languages.
Lessons Learned (Coming Soon): I’ll share a note once the human translations are available. And, in a future post I will also cover (a) how to contract for transcriptions, (b) how to work with colleagues to create video translations (it’s easier than you think), and (c) how to upload/incorporate transcriptions and translations into your videos since I know that increasingly we’re seeing evaluators sharing video on YouTube.
Hot Tip – Make the Most of YouTube:

Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.
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Ed Eval Week: Anne Marshall on Gearing up to Evaluate in the Age of the Common Core
No comments · Posted by Sheila Robinson in Prek-12 Educational Evaluation
My name is Anne Marshall, Director of Research and Evaluation for the Center for Collaborative Education. PreK-12 education and educational evaluation are a-buzz with phrases like “21st century skills,” “college and career ready,” and, of course, “Common Core State Standards (CCSS).” With these new changes, evaluators may be feeling the same initiative fatigue that many educators feel. How do we ensure we have the knowledge needed to evaluate programs arising from this latest wave of education reform? Fortunately, many useful resources exist to get us up to speed and informed.
Rad Resources: Getting Started: What underlies new frameworks and standards is a shift to learning content along with real-world skills that will allow students to apply knowledge in a world requiring constant innovation and problem solving.
Fablevision and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills demonstrate the thinking behind 21st century skills and college and career readiness in a short animated video, Above and Beyond.
Partnership for 21st Century Skills also provides resources, including P21 Common Core Toolkit. While this resource is designed to help schools and districts implement CCSS, its descriptions of practices and how they align to 21st century skills and content standards can be invaluable for identifying best practices in programs we evaluate.
Look at CCSS website for materials specific to CCSS.
Hot Tip: Look up specific math or ELA standards by grade level and topic with a free Common Core Standards app from Mastery Connect. The number of webinars on CCSS grows daily and a great one-stop-shopping source is iTunes U. Their collection includes webinars by the National Governors Association & Council of Chief State School Officers, ASCD, and states’ departments of education.
Rad Resources: Because outcomes in PreK-12 evaluation often include data from state assessment systems, the two assessment consortia, Smarter Balanced and PARCC, will soon be dominant forces in our work. Full implementation of the assessments is scheduled to begin in the 2014-2015 school year. Websites for each of the consortia provide updates, sample items, etc. that can help us in thinking ahead about future evaluation work.
Lesson Learned: In talking to PreK-12 educators about the shift to 21st century skills and adoption of CCSS, I have most often encountered reactions of frustration and anxiety – key symptoms of initiative fatigue. It is yet one more change or addition to what they must accomplish in their work and another change to how their students and programs will be evaluated. Being mindful of this can strengthen evaluation work. In evaluating this new wave of education reform, we must pay attention not just to large-scale measurable outcomes on key standards, but also to systems and supports in place to assist this transition.
The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Ed Eval TIG Week with our colleagues in the PK12 Educational Evaluation Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our Ed Eval TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.


