Public Policy Analysis and Program Evaluation

Hello all and welcome to the final podcast episode on our course material! In today's longer-than-intended podcast, I'm talking through Chapters 11 and 12, with an emphasis on how we interpret and share evaluation information with others. It's truly critical that we don't misinterpret or overinterpret our results, but it's crucial that we find the right ways to communicate our information so others use the work we've done in an evaluation. Thank you all for your work in this course--I appreciate the time and effort you've committed and I look forward to wrapping our course very soon!

Hi all, and welcome to our penultimate (second-to-last) podcast episode for our course on Evaluation! In this episode, we're tackling chapters 7 through 10, but with particular emphasis on chapters 7 and 8 due to the relevance of each for the final project. Chapter 7 is centered on evaluation questions while Chapter 8 is all about research design. Each of these chapters will be important for use with your evaluation plan/matrix. Chapter 9 provides us with a "how-to" for chapter 8 and chapter 10 is all about data analysis as well as the unexpected and unintended elements of an evaluation (which is a section I think could be of use to any evaluator). After you work through the podcast and slides, let me know what questions you have and I'll get back to you ASAP!

Hey everyone--we've hit the midterm point in this course and this episode is intended to help you navigate the midterm exam. The episode is certainly short but it contains my recommendations (tips) on how best to approach this test. If you've not taken an exam with me before, it never hurts to listen to about 10 minutes of guidance/suggestions (and if you've already taken tests with me, you probably know all of what is contained in this episode). Good luck on the exam and as always please email me with any concerns or questions!

Hello course participants and welcome to our third episode on public policy and program evaluation! In this episode we will talk through the highlights from chapters 4 through 6, including a more in-depth discussion of chapter 4's calibrators, a few more details on chapter 5's program narrative, and a good deal more on chapter 6's logic modeling. I would recommend focusing on chapters 4 and 6 as these are the more applied elements of evaluation and will serve you well (hopefully!) on your policy/program analysis project. Do let me know of any questions or concerns by emailing [email protected] and I'll get back to you as soon as I can to assist!

Hi all, and welcome back to our podcast on Public Policy Analysis and Program Evaluation! This episode formally kicks off our study of this topic with a brief highlighting of components in chapters 1-3 that are critical for gaining a solid understanding of what is meant when we talk about evaluation. In chapter 1, we are going to get a lot of terms; I would say to focus on bolded terms like formative evaluation and summative evaluation that show up in the edges of the book pages. Chapter 2 takes us through the history of evaluation... which is great background knowledge but not something you need to dwell on too much although knowing the history of unethical research is certainly eye-opening. Our final chapter, chapter 3, is going to delve into present-day ethical considerations as well as the competencies that we look for in evaluators. These first few chapters are relatively easy and provide context, but if you find gaps in your understanding, please email me at [email protected] and I will assist you as soon as I can!

Hello everyone and welcome to our podcast on Public Policy Analysis and Program Evaluation! In this first episode, we will get an introduction to this course and in particular to the course Canvas site. Some of the most critical tools you will need to navigate this class are the Weekly Roadmap pages which are discussed early on. We will spend about 15-20 minutes on that as well as the other parts of the Canvas site such as the Syllabus, Assignments, Grades, and Announcements. This episode wraps with a few tips to (hopefully) make working through this course a big more manageable. I'm very happy to have you joining this course and look forward to 'speaking' with you for the next several weeks!