Lesson Summary

We discussed why it is important to make an evaluation plan and how an evaluation plan is different from the plan of implementation for a program. When making your evaluation plans, you will have to use the methodological principles you will learn in this course, but you will have to "tailor" them to the specific conditions of the program you are going to evaluate.

An evaluation plan should include information about the purposes of the evaluation, the program structure and circumstances, and the resources available to conduct the evaluation. We discussed the issues in each of these areas.

In this lesson you have been introduced to the concept of stages of evaluation. We discussed the five stages briefly: needs assessment, assessing program theory, process evaluation, outcome and impact assessments, and efficiency assessment. We will spend most of time in this course discussing the details of the issues and methods used at these stages.

In this lesson, we summarized the kinds of evaluation questions that can be asked in each stage of program evaluation and then the generic advice given in our textbook on how to gather information for and how to formulate these evaluation questions.