We are Zhao Min, Deputy Director of the Asia-Pacific Finance and Development Institute (AFDI) in Shanghai, China, and Ningquin Wu, Coordinator at AFDI. AFDI is a member of the CLEAR Initiative (Centers for Learning on Evaluation and Results) and hosts the East Asia CLEAR Center. CLEAR promotes evaluation capacity building in regional centers across the …
I am Ryan Watkins from George Washington University. Needs have been described and defined in many different ways of the years (see the December issue of New Directions in Evaluation for elaboration). One consequence of this often perplexing medley of definitions is that the word need has lost much of its meaning. Here I will …
NA TIG Week: Ryan Watkins Words Matter: As is the case with needs Read More »
I’m Lisle Hites, Chair of the Needs Assessment TIG and Director of the Evaluation and Assessment Unit (EAU) at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Today’s posting is about the use of data visualization to enhance your needs assessment. Recently, my team worked with a state agency to help them identify potential sites for …
NA TIG Week: Lisle Hites Using GIS in Your Needs Assessment Read More »
I’m Maurya West Meiers, Senior Evaluation Officer at the World Bank and coauthor of A Guide to Assessing Needs: Essential Tools for Collecting Information, Making Decisions, and Achieving Development Results. I often work with groups in carrying out needs assessments, collecting data, training, facilitating retreats, etc. So I’m always looking for facilitation tips and resources. Today I’m …
NA TIG Week: Maurya West Meiers on Facilitation Tips When Working With Groups Read More »
Hello, my name is Sue Hamann, and I work at the National Institutes of Health. One part of my job is to solicit and review proposals from evaluation contractors for various types of evaluation projects, including needs assessment and program planning. Today I will share some tips about improving your proposed needs assessment. Hot Tips: …
NA TIG Week: Sue Hamann on How to Improve a Needs Assessment Proposal Read More »
Ever thought about doing research on needs assessment (or evaluation for that matter)? My name is Ryan Watkins and what follows is a short description of a basic framework that can help you consider the types of research that could be useful. Based on Briggs (1982) and Driscoll (1995), the following research paradigms can offer …
NA TIG Week: Ryan Watkins on Research Paradigms for Needs Assessment (or Evaluation) Read More »
I’m James W. Altschuld. When Ryan Watkins asked me to write a NA entry for this year’s aea365 sponsored week, he playfully dubbed me the ‘Patron Saint’ of Needs Assessment. While his perception is not accurate, allow me in that spirit to offer some commandments for Needs Assessors. Thou: art a facilitator of a process …
NA TIG Week: James W. Altschuld The 10 Commandments of Needs Assessors Read More »
Greetings! I’m Sara Vaca, independent consultant at EvalQuality.com and Creative Advisor of this blog. Creativity is another powerful tool evaluators can potentially use at certain points of the evaluation process to improve engagement or to solve eventual dead-ends or conflicts. So I have started posting about this subject and today I’m going to share my …
Sara Vaca on Fostering Creativity in Evaluation Read More »
I’m Chad Green, an internal evaluator at Loudoun County Public Schools near Washington, D.C. I’ve worked on many systemic change initiatives over the years, and every so often I get one that defies logic. To make sense of initiatives such as these, I often use a design framework from the book How People Learn by …
Ed Eval TIG Week: Chad Green on Making Sense of Systemic Change Initiatives Read More »
Hi! We are Courtney Howell and Shelly Engelman, evaluators at SageFox Consulting Group in Atlanta, GA. We are social psychologists who happen to be education evaluators. As such, we regularly employ our social psychology backgrounds to inform our work. Persuasion is part of every aspect of life. This reality is no different for evaluation. Persuasion …
