Web Sites for Learning About Best Practices

I thought I'd pass on a useful list of web sites for finding out more about best practices. This list was compiled by Karl Hamner and forwarded to the Evaltalk Listserv. Hope you find it useful. David


On-Line Best Practice Resources

Mental Health & Substance Abuse: SAMHSA’s National Registry of Effective Programs (NREP) provides effective substance abuse and mental health programs for every community at http://modelprograms.samhsa.gov/.

The Department of Justice has a wide variety of youth violence prevention resources on its well-organized site at http://www.usdoj.gov/youthviolence.htm.

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) is committed to helping colleges and universities reduce alcohol-related problems on their campuses, protect students from harm, and improve quality of life for the entire campus community. To achieve this, NIAAA has created the resource Reducing Alcohol Problems on Campus: A Guide to Planning and Evaluation.
This is available free at http://www.collegedrinkingprevention.gov/Reports/Handbook/default.aspx.
Other related and useful publications can be found at:
http://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications /guides.htm.

The Department of Education (DOE) has published Identifying and Implementing Educational Practices Supported By Rigorous Evidence: A User Friendly Guide. This guide provides K-12 educational practitioners with user-friendly tools to distinguish practices supported by rigorous evidence from those that are not. It is available at http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/research/pubs/rigorousevid/index.html. More related resources from The National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE) are at http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ies/ncee/index.html.

The What Works Clearinghouse web site, http://www.whatworks.ed.gov, by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, gathers together current best practices in education. The introduction reads: “On an ongoing basis, the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) gathers studies of the effectiveness of educational interventions (programs, products, practices,
and policies). We review the studies that have the strongest design, and report on the strengths and weaknesses of those studies against the WWC Standards so that you know what the best scientific evidence has to say.”


Karl Hamner
www.kmhconsulting.com

Do You Know What a Summative Evaluation is?

Robert Stakes

"When the cook tastes the soup, that’s formative; when the guests taste the soup, that’s summative."

Summative Evaluation: The assessment or judgment of the value of a program, product, service or educational intervention in relation to similar programs, products, services or educational interventions. The judgment of value is also based on the expected changes in the target population and based on a theory about how the program, product, service or educational intervention is supposed to work. (David S. Robinson, 2004)

Short List to Build Evaluation Culture in Organizations

There is nothing harder than starting out to evaluate a new program. Well, actually it is easier to evaluate a new program than to evaluate a program that has already been running for a time. Here is a short list of things to consider when beginning to evaluate a program - something to get you started:

1. Start with the leaders and gain their approval - as high up as you can go.
2. Then double back and gain approval from the line staff, the personnel who do all of the work, and who will probably provide most of the information for the evaluation.
3. Learn as much as you can about the work culture and the details of the activities that people do.
4. Use some form of structured logic modeling to organize what you learn about the organization, and detail the goals and objectives of the program, the resources used, the activities enacted to meet the goals and objectives, the direct products (or outputs) of the activities, and the immediate, intermediate and long-term outcomes.
5. Brainstorm what would be an observable indicator for each objective and outcome.
6. For each indicator establish a data source and collection method with a schedule and responsible personnel identified.
7. Share with leaders and line staff and revise, revise, and revise until everyone is sick of it or agrees it is the best plan.
8. Congratulations, you are well on your way if you have gone this far.