Saturday, August 20, 2011

What we've been working on this summer

Every year, summer goes so fast. Here in Hawaii, our new academic year is starting this coming week! Dr. John Norris is back from his one-year sabbatical, and we've been keeping ourselves busy with outreach work and resource building this summer.

Between July 29th--31st, we had a group of enthusiastic Middle Eastern language program (MELP) educators from various universities (not only US-based, but also people from overseas, too!) gather at the University of Texas, Austin to attend our three-day workshop on program evaluation and outcomes assessment (see our previous blog post). We had very energetic discussions on the issues surrounding program evaluation in college programs, including ways to transform evaluation culture, strategies to take advantage of the external evaluation "wave" (we had a series of surfing themes going on, since the facilitators were all from Hawaii!), and so on. Presentation materials and discussion summaries are all posted on our new resource page, so check it out!

John Davis (one of our collaborating staff) created a very useful guide on "Using surveys for understanding and improving foreign language programs". An abbreviated version of the content was delivered at the MELP workshop, and you may find his presentation slides to be useful as well.

Contact us for any updates on evaluation work in your program! We'll be happy to showcase your work in our blog. 

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Patton's new book "Essentials of U-FE"

Essentials of Utilization-Focused Evaluation (by Michael Quinn Patton) will be released this month from Sage Publications! 

The new book on U-FE is a concise summary of his popular book, Utilization-Focused Evaluation (4th edition). Patton takes the reader through 17 steps of Utilization-focused evaluation from situational analysis (Step 1) to meta-evaluation of evaluation use (Step 17). Each chapter includes case study examples to show how evaluation theory/approach is applied in various program contexts.