I’m finishing up a project for one of my graduate courses, Program Evaluation. I’m also taking a course this quarter on Program Planning. I was able to use the same program for both course projects – I developed a program plan for the one course and a program evaluation for the other. I believe this may be the first time I’ve spent just as much time on the evaluation of a program as I did on the planning. Probably many of us would be in the same boat, spending hours upon hours planning for a program, but minutes on the evaluation. And yet, a proper program evaluation can be the only way we know if all the hours of planning made any difference!
How do you evaluate? With a quantitative or qualitative design? Using a formative or summative approach? Even if you don’t think in these terms, the point is that we spend at least a fraction of the time we spend planning a program on planning on how we will evaluate the program. It can make all the difference in the achievement of our program’s goals.
