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Social Return on Investment: Metrics, Methods, and Market Solutions
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Video
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Dr. John Gargani—President, Gargani + Company
Social Return on Investment: Metrics, Methods, and Market Solutions
Wednesday, February 7, 2013
Noon-1pm
I provide an overview of social return on investment (SROI), acting as both champion and critic. SROI may be unfamiliar to many evaluators. It is one of several metrics—borrowed from business, economics, and finance—that quantifies the monetary value of program impacts. Investors are using it to develop new “impact investment” strategies. Policymakers are using it to experiment with public-private funding mechanisms, such as social impact bonds. Should evaluators be using it to demonstrate program effectiveness? That’s the question we will explore together. |
Project Management for Evaluators
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Steven Dibble—Associate Director—P3MO, Stryker, and IDPE Student, WMU
Project Management for Evaluators
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Project Management is the discipline of organizing work to improve a team’s efficiency and effectiveness. To realize these benefits, good project managers have mastered a set of technical, interpersonal, and contextual skills that are applicable to most industries including Evaluation. This Evaluation Café presentation will define the project management discipline, showcase key concepts that will positively impact your evaluation practice, and recommend resources to develop your skills further. |
Student Assessment in 21st Century Education
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Dr. Arlen Gullickson—Professor Emeritus, The Evaluation Center, WMU
Student Assessment in 21st Century Education
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Noon-1pm
This presentation looks at the two primary types of student assessments in use today, summative and formative assessments. It contrasts the two types of use in terms of their characteristics and applications, and discusses issues surrounding their use. The argument is made that summative evaluation is given much greater attention and financial resources are squandered on summative evaluation practices. A case for greater attention given to formative assessment is presented. Suggestions are made for when and how formative assessment can effectively be used in classrooms along with key attributes that must be greatly improved if formative assessment is to reach its potential for improving student learning.
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Evaluation the Jedi Way: Using Star Wars for Evaluation Training
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Dr. Lori Wingate—Assistant Director, The Evaluation Center, WMU
Evaluation the Jedi Way: Using Star Wars for Evaluation Training
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Noon-1pm
Learn evaluation, you will.When an evaluator provides evaluation training to an audience that works outside his or her realm of expertise, it can be a challenge to develop a good case for applying the workshop’s concepts or tools. A good case is brief so it can be read and understood in a short period of time, yet complex enough to require critical thinking. It should be relevant to participants’ background knowledge and work contexts, but not so much so they they get caught up in the details or realism of the situation. A good case for evaluation training demonstrates how evaluation principles can be applied across disciplines and content areas. In this session, we’ll look at an evaluation case based on Star Wars (Episode I) developed for a workshop on data interpretation for public health evaluators. What are its strengths and weaknesses as a vehicle for learning about evaluation in general and data interpretation specifically? For what other evaluation topics could it be used? What other popular culture sources could be mined for raw materials for evaluation cases. |
Universal Design for Evaluation
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Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Dr. Jennifer Sullivan Sulewski, Ph.D.—Institute for Community Inclusion, University of Massachusetts BostonDr. June Gothberg, Ph.D.—Senior Research Associate, Office of the Vice President of Research, WMU
Vulnerable populations including persons with disabilities, the homeless, chronically ill, veterans, economically disadvantaged, low-literate, elderly, and culturally different are frequently involved in or affected by evaluations, regardless of the specific topic under investigation. Designing evaluation tools to include persons with disabilities and other vulnerable populations is critical to ensure these populations are fairly represented and included in the evaluation process. Universally designed evaluation plans, materials, and data collection tools provide for more inclusive, sound and valid evaluation practice. This presentation will describe the concept of universal design for evaluation (UDE) and discuss a UDE checklist developed by the presenters. |
Meta-evaluation as Capacity Building for Evaluation Stakeholders
Video will be posted when available.
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Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Dr. Robin Lin Miller—Professor Ecological-Community Psychology, MSU
The U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) Caribbean Regional Program is a technical assistance program aimed at developing a sustained response to HIV in the Caribbean region. PEPFAR Caribbean represents a partnership effort of twelve Caribbean governments, two regional partners, and five U. S. government agencies (USAID, HRSA, CDC, Defense, Peace Corps). The aim of the partnership is to reduce HIV/AIDS incidence and prevalence in the Caribbean region, build the capacity of national governments to develop and maintain sustainable, comprehensive and effective national HIV/AIDS programs and strengthen the effectiveness of regional coordinating agencies and non-governmental organizations to provide quality, cost-effective goods and services to bolster national HIV/AIDS programs. A key goal area for the region is improving capacity to collect and use strategic information. I will describe how the PEPFAR Caribbean Regional Program improved the strategic information capacity of its U. S. government PEPFAR program managers through a meta-evaluation process that incorporated developmental elements. Specifically, I will present on how the U. S. government PEPFAR management team used a meta-evaluator to increase its capacity to commission and use evaluation and insure the quality of its mid-term evaluation. Specific steps in our meta-evaluation process will be described, including how the meta-evaluator used review of prior evaluations and current activities to help the team to assess readiness to commission a mid-term evaluation and prepare to select and work with a mid-term evaluation team. LOCATION: ELLSWORTH 4410 TIME: NOON-1PM |
The ABCs of Goal-Free Evaluation
Video
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Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Dr. Brandon W. Youker—Assistant Professor, School of Social Work, GVSU, and
Lyza Ingraham—Graduate Assistant, School of Social Work, GVSU
Goal-free evaluation (GFE) is an evaluation model where the evaluator is deliberately kept from the stated goals and objectives of the program; this is accomplished by appointing a screener to keep goal-related information from the goal-free evaluator. Although GFE has been around for more than half a century, goal-based evaluation (GBE) continues to dominate evaluation practice and the literature on GFE remains sparse and highly theoretical. This presentation will introduce social service workers to GFE, provide a brief history of the model, discuss some of the theoretical arguments for and against it, and articulate actual principles and operations for conducting a GFE.
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National Secondary Transition Technical Assistance Center’s Model for Building Capacity for Evaluation
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November 6, 2012
Dr. Jennifer Coyle—Research Associate, Office of the Vice President of Research, WMU, and Dr. June Gothberg—Senior Research Associate, Office of the Vice President of Research, WMU
The National Secondary Transition Technical Assistance Center (NSTTAC) is a federally funded technical assistance and dissemination center. One of our charges is to build capacity of state and local departments of education to improve transition education and services. An ongoing process of strategic planning, implementation, and evaluation is the basis for our NSTTAC continuous improvement model. In this session we will provide an overview of our model and participants will leave with a copy of the NSTTAC Evaluation Toolkit, 2nd edition.
NSTTAC website: http://nsttac.org
NSTTAC Evaluation Toolkit: http://www.nsttac.org/content/evaluation-toolkit-second-edition |
Failure of Intervention or Failure of Evaluation: A Meta-evaluation of the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign Evaluation
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Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Dr. Stephen Magura—Director, The Evaluation Center, WMU
The national Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign was conducted during 1998-2004 and evaluated through a national, four-wave panel study of adolescents. The evaluation’s results were unexpected and controversial, finding both no effects overall and a possibly harmful effect, namely inducing initiation of marijuana use. A meta-evaluation by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) supported the original evaluation’s major conclusions, but the Campaign’s sponsor, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), contested both the original evaluation’s findings and the GAO’s assessment of them. This study presents an alternative meta-evaluation of the original evaluation, concluding that the Campaign probably was ineffective, but without sufficient evidence of harmful effects. |
Why is it so? An Analysis of Evaluators–Stakeholders Communication Based on Communication Theories
Video will be posted when available.
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Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Maran Subramain—Coordinator for International Student Activities, WMU
Evaluators and their clients often have different backgrounds, tasks and training. At the same time, they interact as equal partners to jointly identify areas for problem solving, evaluation, and research. To date, evaluator–stakeholder communication is an understudied area in the field of evaluation, with very few studies examining evaluation practice with a communication lens. This presentation explores the nature of evaluator-stakeholder communication through selected interpersonal communication theories. In particular, the presenter will inform the practice of evaluation in terms of how evaluators interact and communicate with their stakeholders and set the stage for future research involving evaluators-stakeholders communication. |
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