Hello Evaluation Learners! I’m Sheila B. Robinson, aea365’s Lead Curator and sometimes Saturday contributor. Today, I’m writing about AEA’s Summer Evaluation Institute, a perennial fabulous learning opportunity. Anyone who knows me knows that I love learning and meeting with evaluation colleagues, and this is the perfect opportunity for both.
Registration is now open for the 2017 AEA Summer Evaluation Institute – June 4 – June 7 in Atlanta, GA. Here’s a quick preview of just a few of the 28 high quality courses offered. Note: Descriptions are truncated, so please visit the site for complete descriptions:
Rad Resources:
This year’s institute will feature an Appreciative Evaluation Keynote by Anastasia (Tessie) Tzavaras Catsambas, founder and CEO/CFO of EnCompass LLC, an organization that provides services in evaluation, learning, leadership and organizational development. Catsambas will demonstrate the scientific basis for using Appreciative Inquiry in evaluation, its contribution to getting better data by minimizing bias, and its role in increasing evaluation use.
Institute course offerings include:
Nonparametric Statistics — What to Do When Your Data Breaks the Rules – Jennifer Catrambone
This session walks participants through nonparametric statistics, techniques designed to be used on small, uneven, or skewed samples. Participants will leave with a stand-alone handout that clearly identifies situations in which nonparametric statistics should be used, explains when and why they are appropriate, illustrates how to run the techniques in SPSS (including annotated screen shots), how to interpret the output, and how to write up the results.
Focus Groups for Qualitative Topics – Michelle Revels
As a qualitative research method, focus groups are an important tool to help researchers understand the motivators and determinants of a given behavior. This course, based on the seminal work of Richard Krueger and David Morgan, provides a practical introduction to focus group research.
Evaluating Organizational Collaboration and Networks – Rebecca Woodland
“Collaboration” is a ubiquitous, yet misunderstood, under-empiricized and un-operationalized construct. Program leaders and organizational stakeholders looking to do collaboration and build networks struggle to identify, practice and evaluate it with efficacy. In this workshop, we will explore how the principles of collaboration theory can be used to plan, evaluate, and improve collaboration in the context of organizations/programs, partnerships, and networks.
A Participatory Method for Engaging Stakeholders with Evaluation Findings – Adrienne E. Adams
In this workshop, learn how to facilitate the “Expectations to Change (E2C)” process, a six-step, interactive, workshop-based method for guiding evaluation stakeholders from establishing performance standards (i.e., “expectations”) to formulating action steps toward desired programmatic change. The E2C process is designed to engage stakeholders with their evaluation findings as a means of promoting evaluation use and building evaluation capacity. The distinguishing feature of this process is that it is uniquely suited for contexts in which the aim is to assess performance on a set of indicators by comparing actual performance to planned performance standards for the purpose of program improvement.
Hot Tip: Act fast to register for the 2017 AEA Summer Evaluation Institute! Courses do fill up!
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.