Demystifying Evaluation: Meet Your New Best Friend in Change-Making

Demystifying Evaluation: Meet Your New Best Friend in Change-Making Keywords: Undergraduate; Faculty; Gender; Race/Ethnicity Abstract This session will include hands-on learning from a practitioner perspective, meant to develop the capacity of CoNECD attendees to work with evaluators on their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) focused projects. Many of the CoNECD attendees are working on grant-funded projects to improve DEI; this session will help them develop a language for program evaluation, provide some promising practices for working with an evaluator, and help them make sure that they have even more impact as a result of a successful evaluation relationship. The session will help guide attendees to make sure the evaluator's lens is calibrated to the DEI project, and will ensure that evaluation recommendations are substantively based in DEI theory and practice. We will discuss promising practices on setting expectations for evaluation, and for evaluation of DEI specifically. We will help attendees work through how to create a logic model. This exercise will share the language used in evaluation, which can help them to develop a broader vision for their DEI project. It also helps attendees to have a common language with evaluators, and work more efficiently. Finally, we will focus on how to interpret evaluation results, how to lean on the evaluator to improve understanding and action on the results, and what kinds of impact evaluation findings can have. Specifically, the session will address the following questions: What evaluation expectations do you have and how can you come to a common understanding with your evaluator? What is a logic model, and how can it help ensure your project success? What should you do with your evaluation results? How can your evaluator help you with interpreting results and furthering your DEI project?