An Assessment of Evaluation Designs

This article provides a critical review of the quality of 12 recent large federal program evaluations. The review focused on elements of the evaluation design, inclusion of evaluation expertise among those who have oversight of the evaluation, and evaluation dissemination. Overall, the process analyses from these evaluations provide good models for how to assess implementation and provide feedback to grantees. However, other features of these evaluations require improvement. For example, program monitoring often did not include adequate outcome data and few evaluations had solid impact analyses. Efforts to disseminate findings to grantees, government stakeholders, and academic audiences were also weak. The authors provide recommendations to improve the evaluations of large federal programs.