Outreach Evaluation Hub

Hi All

Good morning. I am just in the process of preparing for a mid-year review of our partnerships local and network level evaluation of learner activity/interactions. I am hoping to use half of our next operational group meeting (due to take place virtually next Tuesday) to review our evaluation activities so far. I am hoping this will be an opportunity for operational colleagues to share good practice and also to open up further discussion of evaluation methods. 

Is anyone else planning something similar at the moment within their partnerships? And if not for this academic year do you have examples you might be happy to share of doing this in the past? 

I appreciate at the moment this is quite (!) challenging given the circumstances. But I think it's still useful (certainly for us as partnership) to undertake this work. 

Best Wishes

Ellen Randall

Have you developed, or working on, tools and resources designed to support local outreach practitioners to do more activity level evaluations as part of their delivery? If so, we would like to hear from you about your materials and experiences of working with practitioners in this way. We are proposing to pool resources to support each other. Please get in touch by emailing j.moore8@exeter.ac.uk.

The Outreach Evaluation hub wants to share information on options and generate solutions towards better evaluation practice. We thought one way to open up a discussion thread is to share some links to our favourite evaluation resources, whether it be articles, guidance documents, case studies, helpful websites... or any other useful materials. 

To start us off…

1) http://journals.sfu.ca/jmde/index.php/jmde_1/article/view/496
Article on Refining Theories of Change which talks about the similarities and differences between theories of changes and other management tools (such as logic models) and sets out the characteristics of stronger theories of change models.

2)

The EEF’s You Tube presentation on using the Effect Size Calculator in Excel, provides useful instruction on how to calculate the effect size (a simple way of quantifying the difference between two groups that captures the size of any difference) using the Excel Effect Size Calculator – link to the excel effect size calculator file.

Do you have things you feel might be of value to the NCOP evaluation community of practice? Can’t wait to hear about them…