STEM PROJECT – EVALUATION NOTES
You have been asked to include evaluation plans in your project proposals. Evaluation is
important because it will provide a valuable source of information to enable you to assess
the performance of your project. It will help you to monitor and measure:
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Performance - against stated objectives
Impact - economical, social, environmental etc
Success – what works well and why
Ultimately, an evaluation should help you to understand if a project is going to plan, if it is
achieving what was intended and how to modify it and make it work better. An evaluation
will inform future investment and planning, and it will facilitate the sharing of good practice
beyond the project at hand.
There are lots of ways to conduct an evaluation and for this reason we are asking you to
think about how you will embed your evaluation plans into your project. It will be useful to
start by thinking about timing, methods and resource implications. Some questions to
consider:
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What are the project aims and what are the evaluation aims?
What measurements will you use?
What targets will you set that you can measure?
What impact are you expecting?
What are your milestones and against what timeline will you review?
What methods and data sources will you use? Think about:
o Data bases and Management Information (MI) which might include
registrations, participation details etc
o Feedback – who are the beneficiaries and what form of feedback is
appropriate (e.g. surveys, observations, interviews, outcome data)?
We are not proposing a single evaluation framework across projects as we recognise a
common approach would be difficult as projects can be so different. When we have seen
the project proposals we aim to provide further guidance regarding particular data and
method requirements and we may suggest a common bank of core questions to be included
to allow greater comparability.
In the meantime, please consider the following points:
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Make your evaluation aims explicit
Timing should be mapped to the key stages of the project
Recognise and make explicit the limitations of your evaluation
Plan how to present results accurately and clearly
Think about recommendations you might be able to make for the project (and beyond
where appropriate).
As we have said, your evaluation will be bespoke and appropriate for your own projects.
However, there will need to be some common measures and some consistency across
projects in order to aid our own meta-evaluation. For this reason we would like to see a
systematic approach to your self-evaluations so that we can get as much common data and
Susan Goodlad (29.11.12)
STEM PROJECT – EVALUATION NOTES
project specific data as possible. We expect this to be largely quantitative, but you may also
have qualitative data.
Whatever methods you employ, it is important that you think about ethical and data
protection implications. For example, any personal or sensitive data must be protected. If
you want to obtain feedback from participants about their experience etc., then you should
tell them at the outset that they may be contacted again for this purpose and they must have
an opportunity to decline (opt out). All activity should comply with the Data Protection Act
1998 and appropriate ethical guidelines.
Susan Goodlad (29.11.12)