Page 366 - DEDU504_EDUCATIONAL_MEASUREMENT_AND_EVALUATION_ENGLISH

Educational Measurement and Evaluation

Notes • Formative evaluation can inform evaluability assessment. Working with funders, programme
managers, staff and participants in the early stages of clarifying goals and strategies making
them realistic and evaluable, establishing how much consensus there is among goals and
interventions and where the differences lie constitutes the essential groundwork for a
formative evaluation.
• Large scale, medium to long term socio-economic programmes are often designed and
implemented in dynamic, fluid contexts characterised by imperfect information, changing
policy agendas and goal posts, unpredictable environmental conditions and moving target
groups of intended beneficiaries. Formative evaluation is a strategy for dealing with a
context of this kind. It starts from the premise that no matter how comprehensive and
considered the programme design, it will invariably require steerage and possibly redirection,
and will be considerably strengthened by opportunities for stakeholder reflection on what
is working, What is not going to plan, and what kinds of changes need to be made.
• Formative evaluation can help to strengthen horizontal structures and processes by creating
and fostering feedback mechanisms and for a, enabling lessons to be shard. It can cultivate
much thinker networks of professional and informal contacts between levels of decision-
making through facilitating intra- and inter- organisational dialogue and learning.
• Formative evaluation includes several evaluation-types :
• needs assessment determines who needs the program, how great the need is, and what
might work to meet the need
• evaluability assessment determines whether an evaluation is feasible and how stakeholders
can help shape its usefulness
• structured conceptualization helps stakeholders define the program or technology, the
target population, and the possible outcomes
• implementation evaluation monitors the fidelity of the program or technology delivery
• process evaluation investigates the process of delivering the program or technology,
including alternative delivery procedures
• The main steps involved
• Step 1 : A first step is gaining the commitment of key stakeholders and programme actors
at all levels to a formative evalution as a collective learning and change-oriented process.
• Step 2 : Building evaluation into programme design so that it is perceived as an essential
tool for managing the programme and helping it to adapt to local conditions within a
dynamic environment. This might include laying the basis for formative evaluation in
the early stages of needs assessment and evaluability assessment, as well as embedding
formative evaluation into ongoing organisational processes and structures.
• Step 3 : Creating an evaluation infrastructure to support formative evaluation as a learning,
change-oriented, developmental activity. This includes working with programme staff on
an ongoing basis to :
• Step 4 : A fourth step entails finding out about the decision-making cycle, the different
stakeholder groups and their respective information needs and interests. These might
include policy makers and programme makers at central level, local site programme
managers, and operational staff.
• Step 5 : Formative evaluation involves an ongoing cycle of data gathering and analysis.
The choice of methods will be determined largely by the questions being addressed, and
the methodological preferences of different stakeholders.
• Step 6 : There are different views as to whether the evaluator’s responsibility stops with
feeding back findings and facilitating processes of learning among programme actors, or
whether she or he also has a role to play in follow-through action.

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