| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

evaluation plans

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 3 months ago

Most projects need to carry out some form of evaluation. There are three main reasons for this: 1) to communicate to donors the expected and actual impacts of the project to help win funding to begin with, and then to show it was money well spent; 2) to show compliance with agreed milestones and budget estimates; and 3) to provide systematic information to support learning and decision making during the implantation of the project.

 

Impact pathways provide a framework for all three. Impact pathways map the types of change the project expects to have. They also provide the impact hypotheses that are needed for ex-post impact assessment. Impact pathways can be used to derive milestones, while reflection on their validity as the project progresses can stimulate learning and change.

 

If the participants in the PIPA workshop wish to develop an evaluation plan we show them how to derive milestones from their summary impact pathways. We suggest they complement the monitoring of milestones with the use of Most Significant Change (Davies and Dart, 2005) to pick up unexpected outcomes. We also suggest regular reflection workshops with the agenda shown in Box 1.

 

 

Box 1: Suggested agenda for a one-day Impact Pathways Reflection Workshop

 

• Short progress reports on project activities

• Review and selection of most significant change stories

• Review of problem trees and network maps to reacquaint participants with the project impact pathways

• Reflection on progress to achieve the milestones

– Document achievement of progress indicators and reasons for changes

– Set progress indicators for next reflection workshop and list changes to individual workplans

• Reflection on relevance of milestones

– Document milestones added, subtracted and modified, and reasons for the changes

• Reflection on whether the impact pathways (as described in Table 1) are unfolding as expected

– Documentation of changes and reasons for them

 

The process of regular reflection on progress along a project’s impact pathways is shown graphically here. The process begins with a PIPA workshop in which the participants develop a shared view of where they want to be three time periods in the future and identify the pathways to achieve that vision (1). As mentioned above, one time period is how long a project can realistically plan with a high degree of certainty. The project then implements activities indicated in column 4 of the outcomes logic model. The Learning Selection Change Model can help with the choice, design and justification of the activities and strategies chosen. The activities leads to changes in KASA and practice of the participants involved. A reflection workshop is held one time period later to reflect on progress, based on the agenda in Box 1. The vision changes to some extent, based on what has been learned, as do some of the activities (2). The process continues (3) as the project makes real improvements and moves closer to achieving the vision.

 

The regular use of evidence (gained through monitoring indicators, Most Significant Change and other analyses) to test the hypotheses contained within the project’s impact pathways constitutes action research which contributes to an improved understanding of how research does and does not bring about developmental change. Good facilitation and documentation of the reflection workshops is critical to the quality of the action research carried out. Such action research can be published (see Douthwaite et al., 2007 for an example).

 

Click here for a guide on how to develop an M&E plan for your project.

 

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.