Program evaluation
From Wilderdom
- Program evaluation in outdoor education, adventure education, & other experiential intervention programs
Starting points
- Why program evaluation? - it has become increasingly important for outdoor education and experiential education organisations to demonstrate clear evidence of effectiveness
- Common practices in program evaluation - what types of program evaluation are conducted? Summarises survey results about outdoor education program evaluation foci, source, and type
- Tools, instruments, & questionnaires - a list of instruments recommended for use in outdoor and experiential education program evaluations
- Needs assessment for program evaluations - to get underway with designing an evaluation, complete this needs assessment. It will help to focus and plan your program evaluation efforts.
- Handling results and benchmarking - Why use effect sizes instead of significance testing for program evaluation? - Effect sizes are underutilised in program evaluation; significance testing is overutilised
- Example evaluations - downloadable examples of outdoor education program evaluation reports by James Neill
Recommended resources
- Basic guide to program evaluation - a knowledge base of program evaluation resources (McNamara, 1999)
- The Evaluation Center - Western Michigan University
- Online Evaluation Resource Library - online library for professionals seeking to design, conduct, document, or review project evaluations
- #programevaluation - jtneill's bookmarks on delicious
References
Gass, M., & Neill, J. T. (2001). Introduction to program evaluation. Presentation to the 29th Annual International Conference of the Association for Experiential Education, 2 November.
Greenaway, R. Evaluation of training/learning books & reviews. Active Reviewing.
Hendricks, B. (no date). Improving evaluation in experiential education. ERIC Clearinghouse on Rural Education and Small Schools.
Neill, J. T. (2010). Program evaluation and outdoor education: An overview. Presentation to the 16th National Outdoor Education Conference, Notre Dame University, Fremantle, Western Australia, January 10-13.
Priest, S. (2001). A program evaluation primer. Journal of Experiential Education, 24(1), 34-40.
Watters, R. (1988). Benefit cost analysis of non-commercial outdoor programs. In Proceedings of the 1986 Conference on Outdoor Recreation.
Watters, R. (1991). Cost benefit analysis of recreation programs for the disabled. Idaho State University Outdoor Program, Pocatello, ID.
