Darrin Quesenberry

5.1 Problem Analysis:

"Evaluation is the process of determining the adequacy of instruction and learning" (Seels & Richey, 1994, p. 54).  I define evaluation as finding out if your work actually accomplished what it was created to do.The domain of evaluation includes four subdomains: Problem Analysis, Criterion-Referenced Measurement, Formative and Summative Evaluation, and Long-Range Planning.

 

Reflection

The evaluation stage in the early days of my career is something that didn’t happen most of the time. Now that I know how to properly evaluate a program or course, I would love to go back and do it for some of my past work. A lot of the government contract work I did didn’t ever have it in the plan or budget to do an evaluation of the work. The client was usually just concerned with getting the training or product complete by any means necessary. Most of the time, I didn’t even know if the training was successful or not. At the most, at the end of a classroom training class we would hand out a survey. Again, now that I know how to write a more effective survey, I would go back and change some of the questions I asked. Prior to beginning this program I didn’t have a lot of knowledge about doing evaluations and the value in doing them.

 

The evaluation phase is something I have a completely different view of now thanks to my experience in this program. Evaluating the effectiveness of a course/program is something I plan to do a lot more going forward. It is information that is critical to my success at my job. I need to know if the programs or the training courses I am creating are doing what they were designed to do. I just can’t assume that they’re because that is what they are intended to do. As a part of one of my classes, I performed a program evaluation of our New Employee Development Program at work. The results I obtained thanks to the skills I learned in the class have helped us restructure the program to make it more effective. The feedback we received from users also reinforced why we do some of the things as a part of the program. Doing an evaluation of the program identified areas that students of the program overall didn’t enjoy or gain anything from. It also helped us realize that parts of the program that we didn’t have as much control over, needed us to step in and take a bigger management role over to ensure effectiveness. If this evaluation wasn’t done, the program would have kept doing the same thing every year with the assumption that everything was fine. A lot of things were fine in the first place. Some critical areas of the program needed to be changed however. Since I didn’t really perform evaluations in past practices, I would say my current practices have significantly improved. This has given me the ability to improve upon my work going forward. 

 

In the future, I think I will use my evaluation knowledge the most to improve training programs. I want to continuously track and review so that I am always improving the user’s experience. I no longer want to look at creating training as a “one and done” thing. 

AECT Standard 5: Evaluation