Building Organizational Capacity for Evaluation

Instructor: Dr. Hallie Preskill, School of Behavioral and Organizational Sciences at Claremont Graduate University

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.

Certificates: CEP 1C.c and CAEP IIC.c