Heather H. Boyd on Aligning Evaluation with Faculty Member Goals

Hi. My name is Heather H. Boyd and I am a program evaluator currently at Virginia Tech. Much of my work is with faculty and staff who are interested in learning about evaluation and improving their evaluation skills. My Ph.D. is in Mass Communications and I have been a practicing evaluator for more than fifteen years.

Lessons Learned: When I align evaluation techniques and concepts to faculty member goals for their educational and research programs, they are much more open to learning about evaluation and incorporating higher quality evaluation practice into their work. Few of the faculty and staff that I work with have formal training in evaluation, and much of their experience with evaluation has been limited to classroom-based feedback forms. So, I try to demonstrate easy ways for them to incorporate gathering evaluation evidence as part of their program routines. And, I show them how to formalize and systemize gathering credible evidence that they previously had not recognized as useful evaluation information. Because my role is evaluation capacity building in my public educational agency, taking small steps and completing small pilot projects fits within a developmental approach to building better evaluation skills and higher quality evaluation products.

This week’s posts are sponsored by AEA’s Extension Education Evaluation Topical Interest Group (http://comm.eval.org/EVAL/Extension_Education_Evaluation/Home/Default.aspx) as part of the EEE TIG Focus Week. Check out AEA’s Headlines and Resources entries (http://eval.org/aeaweb.asp) this week for other highlights from and for those conducting evaluations in an Extension Education context.