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Introduction:
Tamra d'Estrée explains how evaluation can influence training goals and help maximize impact.
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This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).
Formative Evaluation
Tamra d'Estrée
Conflict Resolution Program, University of Denver
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A: What we're trying to do is develop ways to track
those changes better because unfortunately when people look at the impact of
this work they tend to look either at individual change, which we tend to find
that yes that does happen, or they look at kind of subsequent systemic change
where all these other complicated factors come into play. It is very unlikely
you're going to see very much change at that level. So how do you see when an
individual might take their new learning or new awareness of options or new
insights into the other and do something slightly differently in the way they
work?
Q: Have you found any particular evaluation technique more favorable to come
up with that kind of result?
A: Well, that's what we're trying to develop. We're basically trying to
develop a framework that alerts practitioners or whoever would be using the
evaluation framework to be looking at that next level of tracking. Or maybe even
building it into the workshops itself. It's not uncommon that what you track in
an evaluation in any kind of social intervention ends up being what then people
train for. Like in education if you start tracking people. You know these
schools have these educational assessments now, and whatever is in the tests is
now what people are training for so that it will show up in the test. And that
sounds negative, but in actuality it may not be bad because if part of what you
start to track in this work is not just changes in individual attitudes but
changes in whether or not people then take new insights into their workplace or
their institution or their networks and do something differently and have their
institution or their network do something different vis-à-vis the other side.
If you start to track that, then you can think about how people might recognize
that it might be important to train that way or to do the workshop in such a way
that you are not just having people's attitudes change.
Rather, you have them
discover new insights about the other, but having them have thought through in
the workshop how are they going to take that new insight out into the world and
do something differently with it in their institution or their network. So you
build it into the first step, into the intervention, how that next level of
change might actually happen, and you get people to plan for it.
Q: It sounds like the evaluation in that case would lead the substance of the
workshop, so that you would need to know what you're going to evaluate before
you start planning for this. So then you can target that particular goal.
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