Meet EvaluATE’s Community College Liaison Panel

The ATE program is community college-based, and as such EvaluATE places a priority on meeting the needs of this constituency. To help ensure the relevancy and utility of its resources, EvaluATE has convened a Community College Liaison Panel (CCLP). CCLP members Michael Lesiecki, Marilyn Barger, Jane Ostrander, and Gordon Snyder are tasked with keeping the EvaluATE team tuned into the needs and concerns of 2-year college stakeholders and engaging the ATE community in the review and pilot testing of EvaluATE-produced materials.

These resources distill relevant elements of evaluation theory, principles, and best practices so that a user can quickly understand and apply them for a specific evaluation-related task. They are intended to support members of the ATE community to enhance the quality of their evaluations.

The CCLP’s role is to coordinate a three-phase review process. CCLP members conduct a first-level review of an EvaluATE resource. The EvaluATE team revises it based on the CCLP’s feedback, then each of the four CCLP members reaches out to diverse members of the ATE community—PIs, grant developers, evaluators, and others—to review the material and provide confidential, structured feedback and suggestions. After another round of revisions, the CCLP engages another set of ATE stakeholders to actually try out the resource to ensure it “works” as intended in the real world. Following this pilot testing, EvaluATE finalizes the resource for wide dissemination.

The CCLP has shepherded two resources through the entire review process: the ATE Evaluation Primer and ATE Evaluation Planning Checklist. In the hopper for review in the next few months are the ATE Logic Model Template and Evaluation Planning Matrix, Evaluation Questions Checklist, ATE Evaluation Reporting Checklist, and Professional Development Feedback Survey Template. In addition, CCLP members are leading the development of a Guide to ATE Evaluation Management—by PIs for PIs.

The CCLP invites anyone interested in ATE evaluation to participate in the review process. For a few hours of your time, you’ll get a first look at and tryout of new resources. And your inputs will help shape and strengthen the ATE evaluation community. We also welcome recommendations of tools and materials that others have developed that would be of interest to the ATE community.

To get involved, email CCLP Director Mike Lesiecki at mlesiecki@gmail.com. Tell him you would like to help make EvaluATE be the go-to evaluation resource for people like yourself.