Why aren’t evaluators adapting their evaluations to the developmental context?

This is the last post in a series of blog posts based on my thesis. Read the introductory post here which describes the developmental context.

Overall, my study found that evaluators are less likely to be participatory—both in the overall evaluation process and in data collection methods—when the program beneficiaries are children than when they are adults. Why is this the case?One possibility is that the evaluators in my study were not well-versed in working with youth. However, half of the evaluators were in the Youth Focused Evaluation TIG or the PreK-12 Educational Evaluation TIG, indicating they had some experience working with youth programs. Membership in these TIGs and self-reported developmental knowledge did not really relate to their evaluation practices.Another possibility is that some other evaluation characteristic, such as their education level, their evaluation role (i.e., internal or external), or years of experience as an evaluator, could relate to their developmentally appropriate practice. Again, there were few differences between these evaluation characteristics in their evaluation practices.Thus, the questions remain: which evaluators are more likely to have developmentally appropriate practice and what are the barriers to developmentally appropriate practice?Some previous research suggests that experienced evaluators, even those experienced in working with youth, may need help in conducting developmentally appropriate evaluations. In a content analysis of youth program evaluations, Silvana Bialosiewicz (2013) found that few evaluations reported developmentally appropriate practices. That study was the impetus for the current study. A follow-up study involved interviewing youth evaluators and found many barriers to high quality youth program evaluation practice (Bialosiewicz, 2015). These barriers included cost and time needed and misconceptions from clients about good evaluation practice. Overall, this suggests that evaluators may need more training in developmentally appropriate practice or better resources for conducting developmentally appropriate youth program evaluations.

Next Steps

As with most research, I’m left with many more questions about developmentally appropriate evaluations than I was able to answer. I believe the results of the study suggest more need in examining youth participatory evaluation. However, I’m particularly interested in survey techniques with children and adolescents. I often see misunderstanding about survey methodology in general, and this is exacerbated when surveying children and adolescents. I am hoping to present at AEA 2017 on best practices in surveying children to help remedy this issue, but I also would like to further study this topic.