Evaluation and impact
Evaluation is the process of looking at the work that you have done and identifying its strengths and weaknesses - what worked well and what could be improved. Additionally, evaluation is looking at the impact of what you did - the effects that your activity had (or continues to have) after the activity itself stopped. Both funding bodies and businesses will be keener to support you if you can demonstrate that you activity will have long-term impact.
Introduction
Many application forms for funding bodies will ask you to explain how you plan to evaluate your project. It is therefore important that you can give details about an 'evaluation framework' as part of your application.
You probably already evaluate a lot of the work that you do, but tacitly, without really thinking about it. When you give lessons you will be aware of what has worked well in the classroom and what needs refining. Project evaluation is similar, but is more structured and explicit.
You can probably tell when your pupils are enjoying themselves when doing an activity, and your observations can form an important part of evaluation. But you will also need to find out from the pupils what they thought about the activity. It is usually a good idea to give them a range of options, from 'I really enjoyed it' to 'I really didn't like it!'
Evaluation should achieve two goals:
- It should prove that you achieved what you set out to do
- It should help to improve future activities
Where to start
When you start to think about evaluation you should consider the following questions (courtesy of Ben Gammon Consulting):
- What do I want to find out?
- How is it going to help me?
- How am I going to find this out and from whom?
- How much time and money do I have?
- How am I going to report the results?
It is important to answer these questions as they are here; that is, from your point of view. You should set up your evaluation such that it is going to provide you with the information that you consider most valuable, since this will also be the information that your supporter is interested in.
'How is it going to help me' is often the most important question. There is little point in evaluating your work if you don't gain anything from it.
When planning your project you should have thought about some aims that you were looking to achieve. For example, in arranging a visit to a science centre you would probably be looking to inspire and enthuse pupils about science and give them an opportunity to learn through interactive exhibits, or experiments beyond the scope of the school lab.
In this instance you would need to find out whether the pupils enjoyed their trip, whether they learned from their trip and, most importantly, whether they really were enthused about science (for example, did it encourage them to pursue further study of a STEM-related subject).
Remember to include how you will evaluate your project as part of project planning itself. This will make the evaluation process quicker, and you will probably also find that it informs your project planning too.
What to find out
You may well find that your supporter requires you to record certain pieces of information. Some common things that you might like to consider are:
- How many pupils took part?
- How many teachers took part?
- How many other individuals/ organisations were involved (for example, scientists, engineers, artists, and so on)?
- Did pupils enjoy the activity?
- Did pupils feel that they had learned as a result of the activity?
- Did teachers feel that they had benefitted from the activity?
- Did attendance at your club increase after this event?
- Were pupils more enthusiastic about the activity's subject area after the activity?
- Did grades in subjects related to the activity increase after the activity?
Bits of information that you can simply count (such as how many pupils took part) are often called 'metrics' and they are easy enough to measure. But other finding out other types of information might take a bit more work, in particular finding out how people felt about an activity.
To evaluate things that are difficult to quantify, other tools are needed.
Tools for evaluation
There are a range of techniques through which you can evaluate activities. They include:
- Observations - simply a description of what you witnessed during the activity
- Questionnaires - help you find out pupils' thoughts about the activity
- Interviews (individual or group) - allow you to get in-depth feedback
These different tools all have relative advantages and disadvantages.
- Observations mean that you do not need to intervene with pupils while they are doing the activity, but they are subjected to bias or interpretation.
- Questionnaires are relatively easy to do, but they depend on good design and can be difficult to follow up on (especially if you allow anonymous responses to encourage openness).
- Interviews allow you to gather in-depth information and probe responses further, but they can be time-consuming and again can have a bias, depending on the interviewer.
The UK Association for Science and Discovery Centres (ASDC) has spent a large amount of time investigating the best way of finding out about pupils' learning. We have created a simple questionnaire which teachers can easily adjust and use as part of their evaluation.
We would be delighted if you wanted to use this questionnaire as part of evaluation process to help show the impact that your project had.
The questionnaire is based on Generic Learning Outcomes (GLOs), which are part of the 'Inspiring Learning' framework developed by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA).