Front-end Evaluation - Evaluation at the project start to inform the work
- Identify what team needs to know in order to design the program for maximum effectiveness.
- Design and conduct needs assessments, pre-program surveys, literature review, landscape study (e.g., interview stakeholders)
Formative Evaluation – Evaluation that guides the leadership team during a project and allows for iterative design
- How can the program be fine-tuned during its lifetime to make it more effective?
- Typical formative evaluation approaches include:
- Feedback surveys of participants
- Website analytics
- Interviews with participants, team members or stakeholders
- Usability studies of deliverables
- Formative evaluation findings are summarized in reports to the project leadership, including a summary of recommendations for improvement of future implementation
Summative Evaluation – Evaluation that summarizes the accomplishments of the project
- How well did the team achieve the project goals and objectives?
- Typical summative evaluation approaches include:
- Longitudinal summary of all evaluation findings across the project duration
- Interview stakeholders to assess the project’s impact
- Triangulation between different data sets
- Report on project deliverables
- Summative evaluation findings are shared through
- Achievement reports organized by goals and objectives
- Contributions to journal articles or presentation
- Data compilation to use in future funding applications
- Summative evaluation reports include recommendations for future project implementations
External Critical Review – “critical friend” to a project team to review project design and implementation
CIRES evaluation and research team can act as a critical friend to a project team to review all project design components including but not limited to i) theoretical framework, ii) logic model, iii) research and evaluation instruments, iv) research design plan, v) program implementation plan, vi) participant recruitment plan, v) dissemination plan, vi) review of deliverables.
Institutional Review Board
Evaluation often requires approval from the institutional review board (IRB) of the institution that performs the study. The IRB board reviews all studies that include human subjects. Regulations differ by institution, if working with CIRES, our evaluation team will request the IRB approval. IRB boards will usually rate evaluation studies as exempt (or even as non-research), requiring minimal oversight of the evaluation process. The IRB board ensures that data is de-identified before sharing, protect the rights and privacy of study participants, and holds the evaluation team to a high standard in data management and storage.
Does my project require institutional review board review?