Measuring Progress: An Introduction to Evaluating Community Programs

This manual is intended to provide readers with easy-to-use information about program evaluation. It is not by any means an exhaustive guide to the topic. Instead it presents some "bare bones" information about selected aspects of evaluation and offers suggestions for where to look for more detailed information.

There is no need to read the manual from cover to cover. For the most part, each topic is presented so that it stands alone. The manual starts off with the benefits of conducting evaluation, and acknowledges some of the potential barriers to doing so. The second section covers some brief definitions and explanations regarding different types of evaluation. Most of what follows focuses on a particular type of program evaluation: Outcome Evaluation, which involves examining whether a program has the effects it is expected to have. Next, six guidelines to meaningful outcome evaluation are discussed. These guidelines outline important methodological characteristics that you should keep in mind while planning your evaluation.

Following the discussion of guidelines, several methods for conducting outcome evaluation, or collecting evaluation data, are presented. Then, several possible program outcomes are addressed (e.g., knowledge and behavior), along with suggestions for how you might go about assessing each of them. The next section addresses evaluation of particular program types. For example, this section describes how evaluating a single-session education program differs from evaluating a more comprehensive peer education program. The final section covers the basic steps to planning an outcome evaluation. By following along in this section and using the accompanying worksheets you could be well on your way to planning an evaluation of your own program.