YOST4325: Improving Everyday Youthwork: Practical Program Evaluation

Program evaluation can enable youth workers to improve the work they do with young people, to financially sustain their work, to communicate with colleagues in a community of practice with the intention of strengthening the youth work field, and to influence youth policy, program design, and practice.Many people who invest time or money in youth programs request program evaluation. As the emphasis on quality continues, youth workers will be expected to support evaluation, at minimum, and may also be asked to manage evaluation projects, either working with an internal or external evaluator, or doing evaluation as part of their job. Youth work positions now typically include these roles, regardless of settings. Evaluation can support ongoing professional development for youth workers. This course emphasizes how evaluation and applied research supports professional development and strengthens overall quality in youth programs. Evaluation and applied research provide frameworks and tools that support youth workers to describe, analyze, synthesize, and better understand how they can create high quality programs and support high quality practice for all young people. Evaluation is considered as both a tool—and a site for—critically examining issues of equity and social justice. The course includes readings and discussion on the social justice implications of evaluation and explores culturally responsive evaluation frameworks. During the feedback process for each stage of evaluation, a social justice lens is used to examine and critique the stage’s process and outcomes. This course offers an introduction to evaluation and applied research for youth workers, through introducing evaluation and applied research concepts, terms, orientations, methods, and tools and their application. During the course, students (individually and in small and large groups) will design, carry-out, and report on an evaluation study. Students will both learn about evaluation and applied research as well as do it! By course conclusion, students will have the knowledge and skills to design and conduct beginning level evaluation and applied research, for their own practice or other youth programs.

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