Evaluation

Background: At past conferences, the NIEHS has promoted the PEPH Evaluation Metrics Manual as a useful resource for program planning and evaluation. This manual identified 5 cross-cutting program areas that are often scrutinized when trying to determine the “success” of a program with regards to partnerships, leveraging, products and dissemination, education and training, and capacity building.

Last year, the Evaluation Workshop group several key questions, concerns, and needs were raised that reflected a desire to share best practices and/or case studies for the following types of evaluation:

  • Capturing bi-directional learning between stakeholders and researchers
  • Capturing relationships fostered by social media
  • Effective methodology for evaluating impact (both internally and externally)

Additionally, the evaluation workshop suggested the following approaches towards addressing these concerns:

  • Use inside and outside personnel to develop evaluation plans
  • Use an auditor to review evaluation data
  • Use trainees from each project to report & use a senior investigator to pull data together for the actual program evaluation
  • Use the advisory boards to provide evaluations

This led the working group to suggest conducting a survey of what each center is doing and what methods are out there.

 

Objective of this workshop:

  1. Determine interest in a webinar by Christie Drew (who worked on the PEPH manual) that is tailored to RTC and CEC.
  2. Share examples of successful evaluation techniques used by your RTC and CEC to begin to compile best practices and case studies.
  3. Determine level of interest in conducting a survey of research translation centers and community engagement cores to identify effective evaluation methods
  4. Develop a working group to develop a commentary paper on evaluation methodology for research translation and community engagement for superfund research centers.