Building Organizational Capacity for Evaluation |
Description: Organizations ask questions about the effectiveness and efficiency of their systems, programs, services, policies, and products, and they are increasingly looking to evaluation to answer these critical questions. This class is about helping organizations build their capacity to acquire and learn from evaluation data to get answers to such questions. Evaluation capacity building is a context-dependent endeavor that requires time and specialized skills to accomplish. The intent of this course is for participants to learn capacity-building strategies and to be able to decide how to choose one over another in a given context. Topics include: (a) Definitions and underlying assumptions of evaluation capacity building, e.g., What does "building capacity" mean? Why do it? What does it look like? How is it related to learning in organizations? (b) Definitions and descriptions of eight different approaches to building organizational within organizations; (c) Context and conditions for choosing among various capacity building strategies/approaches; (d) Challenges involved in implementing capacity building strategies in organizations; (e) Special knowledge and skills needed by evaluators to do organizational capacity building. A variety of instructional methods will be used, e.g., mini-lectures, small-/large-group activities, case study, and independent work. Prior experience in designing and conducting evaluations is expected. Instructor's text on Building Evaluation Capacity: 72 Activities for Teaching and Training (Sage, 2004) will be provided as part of course fee. Dr. Hallie Preskill is Professor in the School of Behavioral and Organizational Sciences at Claremont Graduate University. In 2005, she was elected to be incoming president of AEA, for the year 2007. She is co-author of Reframing evaluation through appreciative practices (with Catsambas, in press); and: Building Evaluation Capacity: 72 Activities for Teaching and Training (with Russ-Eft, 2004); Evaluation in Organizations: A Systematic Approach to Enhancing Learning, Performance & Change (with Russ-Eft, 2001); Evaluative Inquiry for Learning in Organizations (with Torres, 1999); Evaluation Strategies for Communication and Reporting (with Torres, & Piontek, 2nd ed., 2004); co-editor of Using Appreciative Inquiry in Evaluation (with Coghlan, 2003); and Human Resource Development Review (with Russ-Eft & Sleezer, 1997). She has served on the Board of Directors of the American Evaluation Association (AEA) and the Academy of Human Resource Development, and is the section editor of the Teaching Evaluation column in the American Journal of Evaluation. She received AEA's Alva and Gunnar Myrdal Award for Outstanding Professional Practice in 2002, and the University of Illinois Distinguished Alumni Award in 2004. For over 20 years, she has provided consulting services in the areas of program evaluation, training, and organization development. She has also written numerous articles and book chapters on evaluation methods and processes, and has conducted program evaluations in schools, healthcare, non-profit, human service, and corporate organizations. 
Certificates:
Fee: $425 |