Evaluation Design

It is very important to work with your evaluator to decide on an appropriate evaluation design for your project. Simple designs are easier to implement, but provide less information, while complex evaluation designs may lead to more accurate results, but can be more difficult to carry out. You must also decide whether to choose a quantitative, qualitative, or mixed approach. Quantitative data can be measured and reported in numerical form, while qualitative data are in narrative format, and are useful for creating documents such as case studies.

Evaluations usually include both a process evaluation and an outcome evaluation:

• Process evaluation documents whether project activities are implemented as planned. They measure, for example, the number of teachers trained to deliver a curriculum, the number of classrooms receiving a bullying prevention program, the number of sessions delivered per classroom, and measures of program fidelity (i.e., faithfulness to the original model). These are described in the “process measures” column of your SS/HS logic model. Process data can help you understand whether or not the activities were a good fit, and whether the quality of implementation was sufficient to permit a good test of the program.
• Outcome evaluation is used to help determine if the project produced the desired outcomes—this might include changes in knowledge, attitudes, skills, or behaviors. It might also include things like policy and/or systems change. These are described in the “goals” and “objectives” columns of your SS/HS logic model (i.e., how different you hope something will look as a result of your project activities).

Examples of the types of information that can be gleaned from process and outcome evaluations can be found in the following PDF documents:

• Logic Model Sample (05-06 cohort)
• Logic Model Sample (07-08 cohort)
• Evaluation Plan Sample (05-06 cohort)
• Evaluation Plan Sample (07-08 cohort)

A discussion about how evaluation design affects an outcome evaluation is provided in Evaluation Designs and Approaches.