Division of Family and Children

Your Final Project for this course is an evaluation plan. An evaluation plan outlines what you intend to monitor or measure and how, along with a plan on how your results will improve the program itself or decision making regarding it. By this time, you have explored different types of evaluation, explored academic discourse, and researched leaders in the field, so it should be apparent how varied program evaluation applications can be. For this reason, there is no prescribed layout or specific list of required components that need to be in your plan. Rather, you are encouraged to use the Shakman and Rodriguez (2015) and CDC (2011) documents in this week’s Learning Resources, along with other resources of your choosing, to craft an appropriate plan for your assessment needs and interest area.
You can create the plan for an existing program in your professional life or you can locate a published program description and work from that premise. Note that the project is to write a plan, not to execute on the plan. This means that the project is a planning exercise that will permit you to explore the ideas around evaluation methodologies, analysis of outcomes, and best practices for writing and reporting. As your research and class discussions have demonstrated across the quarter, there are a wide variety of approaches to evaluation. You will use your judgment as to which approaches will work for you—and as a scholar you will know about the rest.
While the plan you develop may have value for your workplace, the project in this course is not intended to be used as action research or impact research during this quarter. As a student working on a course project, you would need to undergo university approval for such work; that approval process is not part of this course.
By Day 7
Submit all parts of the Final Project, which include the following:

A 5- to 10-page proposal for an evaluation plan, reflecting evaluation elements presented in the Shakman and Rodriguez (2015) and CDC (2011) resources, or other resources of your choosing.
The presentation should be professional, as if it were being prepared for an agency.
A reference list in APA format. Start the reference list on a new page, labeling it as an appendix.