Creative Services for Web and Education

Conducting Formative and Summative Evaluations

Spring 2007

In Conducting Formative and Summative Evaluations, taught by Julie Caplow, Ph.D., we learned to conduct evaluations and provide plans which are suitable for external audiences.

This course provided an excellent workflow for us as students. Each assignment was dedicated to creating a section of our final evaluation plan so at the end of the semester, the final plan only needed polishing since we had written it in portions all along.

Final Project

I worked as part of a four-person team throughout the semester to create our 20-page plan. We called ourselves the ADD-IT Team 2007.

It was a close and intense process with weekly phone conferences and hundreds of e-mails exchanged. Our final project was the Achievement through Data-driven Decision-making and Instructional Technology (ADD-IT) Evaluation Plan (Word). For our project, we focused on the Web site of the ADD-IT grant project.

With both formative and summative components, our plan included an examination of the usability and the effectiveness of the site in meeting its grant objectives.

Overview

This evaluation plan addressed the Web site portion of the ADD-IT project. The plan presented an executive summary as an overview and then specified the background, purposes, limitations, audiences, decisions, questions, methods, sample, instrumentation, logistics, timeline and budget for the evaluation.

The methodology, procedures and instrumentation described in this plan are based on review of the existing content on the ADD-IT site as well as on meetings and correspondence between the project leader and the evaluation team.

Artifacts

Artifacts include Assignment 3 (Word) which was the Purposes section of the plan.

As a team, we produced the bulk of our collaborative work on our ADD-IT wiki.