Evaluation Plans Are Like Life Plans

For many people, designing an evaluation plan at first may seem daunting, but here’s a comparison that can make it more approachable: A good evaluation plan has much in common with a good life plan.

A life plan is a road map that includes your life goals and milestones, along with plans for how to reach these goals and milestones. Let’s explore some of the commonalities.

Goals
Both evaluation plans and life plans should have well-thought-out, achievable, personalized goals you want to accomplish. Ask yourself: What is it that your project uniquely wants to accomplish? Projects, like life, have both comprehensive, long-term goals and smaller, short-term goals.

For example, a long-term goal may be to transform all STEM education at your institution. As a way to reach this long-term goal, you may want to increase the number of faculty trained to teach AI data analytics at your institution.

Activities
Like a life plan, an evaluation plan needs to include a list of activities you will do to reach your goals. While goals may be lofty (for example, “Incorporate computational thinking across the curriculum at my institution”), activities are simply the concrete steps needed to accomplish them (e.g., “Conduct workshops to train faculty to incorporate computational thinking in their classes).

Indicators
In life we often measure our success based upon milestones such as degrees, jobs, and awards. Evaluation plans should have similar indicators of success.
Ask yourself: How will I know if my project is successful? Is it the number of students who participate or who continue in a STEM career? Is it the number of teachers trained or the number of teachers who incorporate the material and/or techniques into their courses? Are there statistically significant gains in student learning? I have used each of these as measures of success in the projects that I evaluate.

Timeline
Both a life plans and an evaluation plan should have a timeline you can refer to to determine whether you are on track. Most of us have timelines for when we want to accomplish certain goals in our lives (for example, the number of years to complete a degree, get a job, or achieve tenure/promotion).

By the same token, an evaluation plan should have a timeline describing when each project activity will occur and when you will measure the success of the project by gathering data for your success indicators, such as participation numbers, surveys, interviews, and student assessments.

Iteration and Flexibility
Neither life plans nor evaluation plans should be rigid. They should allow for flexibility to change based upon new knowledge gained along the way. In life, we learn new information and, as a result, change our life plans. (If you discover that you faint at the sight of blood, for instance, you may decide that becoming a doctor isn’t the best career option.)

This is true in evaluation, too. For example, in a recent evaluation that I was conducting, the project found from open-ended survey questions that students were gaining teamwork and leadership skills from the project⎯an outcome we had not initially been measuring. In response, we added questions to the closed-ended survey to more fully capture the number of students who had made gains in these skills.

Goals, activities, indicators, timeline, and iteration/flexibility. I hope these points of comparison between life plans and evaluation plans ease your way into the creation of your next grant evaluation plan.