111 - Learning Evaluation Through Doing Evaluation: Guidance & Reflection in Human Services Education

Abstract Information: During human services instruction on evaluation, the contexts of investigating programs and involving stakeholders in the process take on more of a community-based emphasis. Due to the multitude of service provisions that may occur within human service organizations, educating human services students needs to involve more organic instructional pedagogy that emphasizes how to think through evaluation needs and structure process-driven investigations. Social justice issues are prominent in evaluation planning, structuring activities, and analyzing data, and evaluation proposals tend to work towards empowering individuals, groups, and overall communities. In their coursework, undergraduates are tasked with finding a local human services agency (often a student's practicum site), learning enough about the organizational practices and values to determine a viable evaluation need, and structuring a proposal that incorporates several evaluation tools as a way of increasing their ability to access and understand methods of structuring process and content analysis. Graduate students engage in a "boot camp" of rapid evaluation background instruction followed by a meeting with a local human services organization director who talks through their agency's needs and thoughts about what would be useful to evaluate. The graduate students are then tasked with collaborating with the agency decision-makers to structure a proposal, conduct activities, analyze data, present findings, and construct an overall evaluation report. Instruction and guidance are provided along the way, with the instructor acting more like an evaluation supervisor as they develop their skills and knowledge. Both student groups write ongoing reflective practice papers to develop their ability to reflect on their learning and develop evaluative thinking strategies. Students also experience "ungrading" where they are encouraged to learn through making mistakes, have meta-instruction on practice-based skills, adjust their writing to build clarity, and develop quality evaluation practices through feedback loops and collaborative practice with fellow students and the instructor. In this panel discussion, graduate and undergraduate students in a Human Services Delivery and Administration program will reflect upon their experience in learning evaluation through doing evaluation practice by engaging with their professor and the audience to describe their learning process and consider ways in which their evaluation education may contribute to their future career paths.