Assignment: Conducting Program Evaluation
Assignment: Conducting Program Evaluation
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Describe and discuss the essential elements of a needs assessment in conducting program evaluation. What are the considerations of choosing and implementing needs assessment? Describe how you will apply cultural sensitivity and relevance within your needs assessment. Provide at least two scholarly references in support of your responses.
This discussion question meets the following CACREP Standards:
2.F.8.c. Needs assessments.
2.F.8.d. Development of outcome measures for counseling programs.
2.F.8.e. Evaluation of counseling interventions and programs.
2.F.8.i. Analysis and use of data in counseling.
2.F.8.j. Ethical and culturally relevant strategies for conducting, interpreting, and reporting the results of research and/or program evaluation.
Program planning and evaluation go together. These six steps can help put your organization on the right track for continuous quality improvement.
Step 1: Define your stakeholders
Your stakeholders are supporters, implementers, recipients, and decision-makers related to your program. Getting them involved early on will help you get different perspectives on the program and establish common expectations. This helps to clarify goals and objectives of the program you’ll evaluate, so everyone understands its purpose.
Step 2: Describe the program
Taking the time to articulate what your program does and what you want to accomplish is essential to establishing your evaluation plan. Your descriptions should answer questions like: What is the goal of our program? Which activities will we pursue to reach our goal? How will we do it? What are our resources? How many people do we expect to serve?
Articulating the answers to those questions will not only help with accountability and quality improvement, but it will also help you promote the program to its beneficiaries.
Step 3: Focus the design of your evaluation
Evaluations can focus on process, means, resources, activities, and outputs. They can focus on outcomes or how well you achieved your goal. You may also choose to evaluate both process and outcomes.
As you begin formulating your evaluation, think about the specific purpose of the evaluation—what questions are you trying to answer? How will the information be used? What information-gathering methods are best suited for collecting what our organization needs to know?
Step 4: Gather evidence
Qualitative and quantitative data are the two main forms of data you may collect.
Qualitative data offers descriptive information that may capture experience, behavior, opinion, value, feeling, knowledge, sensory response, or observable phenomena. Three commonly used methods used for