Outcome evaluation focuses on whether and to what extent specific,
tangible goals and objectives established for the program are achieved.
The emphasis is on the outcomes of the program and your ability to
document them.
You have two basic goals in outcome evaluation:
(1) to document what happened in terms of utility or frequency (as
opposed to how it happened in process evaluation) and
(2) to document what changed as a result of the program. In the first
area of outcome evaluation, people attend to questions about the extent
of involvement or activity. For example, how many students were actually
trained? How many parents attended the workshop sessions? How many
cases went to mediation? How many cases were resolved in mediation?
How many times were student mediators linked with community mediators
in community mediation situations?
In the second area of outcome evaluation, the notion of proving change
requires that you have some way to compare what the situation was before
the program with what happened during and/or after the program. Most
of us are familiar with pre-test and post-test designs and the use
of control groups that are necessary for this kind of outcome evaluation.
The types of outcomes that can be evaluated are as varied as the types
of programs that exist. However, we can talk about five general kinds
of outcomes that most programs are interested in at some level.
Skills/Abilities Learned
Conflict management teaches foundational abilities
necessary for the enactment of constructive conflict management. Thus,
outcome evaluation may focus on questions about how well children learned
the skills of active listening, perspective-taking, empathic response,
generation of alternatives, anger control, etc. How well do mediators
learn the actual process of mediation? How well do parents learn the
process of emotional coaching and anger management? The key is to clearly
specify the skills and abilities that you are trying to teach in the
program and to make sure that these are being evaluated in terms of
how well the program developed these skills or abilities in participants. Click the Feedback button for explanations.
Attitudes Changed
Many conflict educators
are interested in helping students adopt more pro-social attitudes.
Depending on the emphasis on social justice concerns, the degree to
which a social justice orientation is developed through exposure to
the conflict management may be a critical outcome to be monitored.
If the guiding motivation is violence prevention, the overriding outcome
of concern may be attitudes toward violent and aggressive action or
the tendency to make hostile statements about another that may escalate
conflict. For whole school programs, an outcome of interest is usually
school climate, or the attitudes that teachers and students have about
the school. Evaluators are often asked to document how school climate
changes over the course of the program implementation.
Behaviors Changed
Given the link between
conflict management and violence prevention efforts, an important
outcome to be evaluated for many people is the degree to which violent
behavior is decreased as a result of the program. How much less likely
is a student to actually fight as a result of training? How many fewer
suspensions or expulsions have occurred in the school since the program
has been in effect? Have truancy rates dropped or increased? Are students
using fewer disruptive behaviors in the classroom? Are teachers holding
fewer disciplinary conferences with parents? Are students behaving
more collaboratively in home or community settings?
Program Utility
Questions of program utility
have to do with the extent to which conflict processes taught have
actually been used in the school. In many programs this is the most
common form of outcome evaluation. As mentioned above, this focus often
assesses how frequently mediation is used, by whom, and with what outcome.
Program utility issues are most germane to mediation programs or to
the mediation component in peaceable classroom or peaceable school
models.
Resources Created
Sometimes outcome evaluation
can focus on resources that are created as a central or peripheral
purpose of the conflict management program. These resources
fall into three categories:
First, there are the tangible economic resources.
For example, sometimes a program outcome is receiving a financial
award based on effectiveness or securing additional funding for continued
work.
Second, there are the instructional products.
Training manuals and instructional material developed or modified
for use in the program can be seen as valuable outcomes.
Finally, there are relationships and infrastructures that
are formed. Especially in programs that link school and community
efforts, an important area of outcome is how well the program helped
develop relationships between the school and external partners that
can serve as the foundation of a larger infrastructure for further
programmatic development or expansion.
Outcome Evaluation