Youth Development Insight

By Samantha Grant Do you do something for work that comes so naturally it’s almost hard to explain it to other people? I’ve spent my career conducting evaluations with youth. Youth evaluation is a language I speak fluently. Last month my colleague John Murray and I presented to Extension staff in Pennsylvania about evaluating youth programs. In this session we had to translate what we naturally do as evaluators.  Maybe you’re new to evaluation or maybe you’ve been evaluating youth for years like me. From my experience, youth workers are natural evaluators because you are always asking questions about your programs. Have you found yourself thinking: How can I make this program better for youth? Why are youth struggling to come together as a team? What could I plan that would get youth engaged? If you nodded your head along with these questions, you’re a natural evaluator. (If you didn’t, start getting curious about your programs. Curiosity is a natural precursor to evaluation.)...

By Samantha Grant For the past year, I’ve been in a new Extension role as a research project director for the Center for Research and Outreach (REACH) . I’ve learned so much about grant funded projects because our team supports the professional development, evaluation, and technical assistance of 41 Children, Youth, and Families At-Risk (CYFAR) programs around the country. Do evaluation requirements for a grant project have you stressed out? Writing and managing grants can be a big undertaking. Many large, national grants require certain evaluation measures. These measures vary by grant. I spent many years evaluating grant projects in Minnesota 4-H, and now I’m on the other side of the table enforcing grant guidelines. The biggest thing I’ve learned from my new perspective is that the funder is often trying to tell a larger story of how all their funded programs connect to the community change they want to address. Sometimes these evaluation measures are a perfect fit for your individu...

By Joanna Tzenis I don’t know about all of you, but if I hear the word “pivot” one more time during this pandemic, I might lose my mind. During the pandemic, many of us in the fields of youth and family development have had to toss our well-planned programs, curricula, staffing plans, and pedagogical practices out the window and improvise new strategies so that young people and families continue to learn and feel valued amidst the most challenging and complex social conditions of our lifetimes. This is why many argue that developmental evaluation is needed now more than ever. What is developmental evaluation?  Developmental evaluation (DE) is an approach that helps “social innovators” find innovative solutions in uncertain and complex environments through rapid feedback on issues that unfold through the implementation of a program. It is best suited for situations when it is impossible to know all the challenges or situations a program might face in the future -- you know, like d...

By Samantha Grant My daughter and I have been reading Betty G. Birney’s Humphrey books. Humphrey is a caring, introspective classroom hamster, and the books follow the school and home lives of a fun group of elementary students. In our most recent book, a guest speaker came to Humphrey’s class and lectured on statistics. Humphrey explained statistics as “harder than any tricky vocabulary words the class had ever practiced.”  The guest speaker clearly didn’t think about his fourth-grade audience (which obviously does not care about statistics), and in the process perpetuated a bad name for people who work with numbers. Numbers people have high expectations put on them. Not only do they have to understand the nuances of their data, but they also have to communicate it with non-numbers people, or people who don’t have time to care about the numbers.  Data matters and can help to tell our story. Before you completely write off numbers and statistics, let’s think about some ways to...

By Somongkol Teng As a program evaluator, I’m often approached for assistance with data collection, analysis, and most importantly, reporting. People often tell me they can't create eye-catching reports or slides because they don't know graphic design or aren't computer-savvy. Good data visualization and communication require more than good computer skills; similarly, a visually appealing slide deck or report doesn’t always imply effective communication.  In this blog post, I’ll share with you five tips for how you can effectively communicate your data visually. Think of your audience(s) Different audiences (e.g. community leaders, funders, staff, parents, youth, etc.) all have different interests or needs, which can affect the choice of format and data you develop for them. A county commissioner, for example, may prefer a high-level overview of the data, whereas program staff may want something more specific, such as how to improve their program. By knowing exactly what yo...

By Somongkol Teng One of the challenges I often face as an evaluator is ensuring that questions in my surveys and other instruments are clear and accessible to diverse audiences. There have been times when youth taking my survey have come back to me looking confused because of the language in my questions. It's easy for adults to forget that what makes sense to us might not necessarily make sense to young people. While there are different ways to tackle the problem, one of the tools I like to use is readability scoring. What is readability scoring? Readability scoring is a computer-calculated measure of how easy a piece of text is to read. The score identifies the educational level a reader would need to understand your text. The lower the educational level needed, the easier your text is to understand. Below are the top three free readability scoring tools you should check out. Microsoft Word Did you know Microsoft Word can assess reading level for you? It’s super si...

By Betsy Olson We collaborate with many different stakeholders and in many different ways. We partner with community organizations. We work with government entities to meet the needs of local youth. We work with our colleagues and, most importantly, we collaborate with young people. How do we know if our partnerships are working? One way to evaluate collaboration is to consider the elements that inspire stakeholders to collaborate with us. Research has identified six elements . Let’s look at these elements and how we can use them to plan an evaluation Recognition: Recognize partners for their contributions Questions to ask: What is the contribution that each partner is most proud of? How have they been recognized for their contribution ? How has the recognition demonstrated an appreciation for their work?  Respect: Partners are respected for the value and importance of the resources, perspectives and knowledge that they bring Questions to ask: In what way do we d...

By Samantha Grant Put down your smiley face surveys. I mean it. Put them down inside of the garbage can. I know that as youth workers we want to get evaluation feedback from our youngest audiences. So, what do we do? We create cutesy evaluations that make little sense to kids and even less sense for reporting. Check out a video that I hope will make you think twice before using a smiley face evaluation scale in the future.  In the video you will learn why I think this scale shouldn't be used. But it still doesn't answer the question, "How can you collect feedback from really young people?" Youth in grades K-2 are learning to read. By third grade, those who read at grade level are reading to learn. So I typically set the lowest grade level for written surveys at third grade. I expect that some of those third graders will still need a survey read aloud to them to fully participate in the data collection. Keep in mind that in a typical third-grade class, o...

By Samantha Grant I work with some brilliant evaluators. They can do some pretty amazing things like use mapping software to see trends or conduct sophisticated evaluations to understand systems that influence our programs. Evaluation can be a very technical field. Not all evaluation is highly technical, though sometimes evaluators perpetuate that idea. I believe, and have seen through my work with youth workers, that some of the most astute youth workers are also great program evaluators. Why do some people feel comfortable conducting evaluations and others don’t? That is the million dollar question. I believe that basic evaluation skills are easy to build with some core tools. With that in mind, I have developed an evaluation website called Evaluating Education Programs to help people who lead educational programs learn more about evaluation. Check out the website by going to: z.umn.edu/evaluatingprograms . You’ll find: Fun and informative videos on topics like creative...

By Samantha Grant Good data visualization matters. I think about, blog about  and train others on ways to improve the way that we share our evaluation findings. Recently, I had personal evidence of how good data visualization matters. My daughter came home from school upset because she scored "urgent intervention" on a standardized math test. I initially didn't believe her because she's a strong student, even though she would rather have her nose in a book than solve multiplication problems. We went through all of the reasons that her score could have been low-- from a bad test-taking day to the test covering topics that weren't discussed in class.