Having just read Harold Jarche’s April 27, 2014 blog, making sense of the network era, about personal knowledge mastery (PKM), I am once again reminded about the challenge of evaluation. I am often asked, “Do you have a form I could use about…?” My nutrition and exercise questions notwithstanding (I do have notebooks of those), this makes evaluation sound like it is routine, standardized, or prepackaged rather than individualized, customized, or specific. For me, evaluation is about the exceptions to the rule; how the evaluation this week may have similarities to something I’ve done before (after all this time, I would hope so…), yet is so different; unique, specific.

You can’t expect to find a pre-made form for your individual program (unless, of course you are replicating a previously established program). Evaluations are unique and the evaluation approach needs to match that unique program specialness. Whether the evaluation uses a survey, a focus group, or an observation (or any other data gathering approach), that approach to gathering data needs to focus on the evaluation question you want answered. You can start with “What difference did the program make?” Only you, the evaluator, can determine if you have enough resources to conduct the evaluation to answer the specific questions that result from what difference did the program make.  You probably do not have enough resources to determine if the program led your target audience to world peace; you might have enough resources to determine if the intention to do something different is there. You probably have enough resources to decide how to use your findings. It is so important that the findings be used; use may be how world peace may be accomplished.

There are a few commonalities in data collection; those are the demographics, the data that tell you what your target audience looks like. Things like gender, age, marital status, education level, SES, probably a few other things depending on the program. Make sure when you ask demographic information that a “choose not to answer” option is provided in the survey. Sometimes you have to ask; observations don’t always provide the answer. You need to make sure you include demographics in your survey as most journals want to know what the target audience looked like.

Readers, what makes your evaluations different, unique, special? I’d like to hear about that. Oh and while you are at it…like and share this post, if you do.