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The Handbook for Evaluating HIV Education - Booklet 8 Reporting Results of HIV Education Evaluations
Five Report Preparation Guidelines Based on the experiences of educational evaluators for well over two decades, the following five guidelines have been identified to assist you in your reporting efforts. Some of these reporting guidelines may be more relevant to you than others. Guideline 1: Evaluation reports should be decision focused. Maintain a decision focus. Educational evaluation activities should provide information that will help program planners make better decisions. If your evaluation study deals chiefly with decisions to improve the program, then the report should be structured so that the relevance of your findings to those decisions is clear. For program-improvement evaluations, decision makers will typically be the HIV education program's instructional staff. If the evaluation study deals dominantly with a decision to continue or discontinue a program, then the report should be organized so that the decision makers will understand how the report's findings bear on their decision. For program-continuation evaluations, decision makers are likely to be school board, administrative, and grant agency personnel. Evaluation reports are organized around fairly conventional sections. Two slightly different organizational structures are presented below: |
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Style 1
Style 2
Although a well-designed evaluation will be conducted to provide decision-relevant information to those making decisions about the program, an evaluator is sometimes tempted to include all of the data collected. However, an evaluation report should be concise and focused only on program-relevant decisions. Guideline 2: Evaluation reports should be as brief as possible. Keep reports brief. This second guideline is really a corollary to the first guideline's focus on decisions. Regardless of whether you're providing a report on a program-continuation evaluation to a school district's governing board or a report on a program-improvement evaluation to health educators staffing an HIV education program, the recipients of your evaluation report are bound to be busy people. To get your report read and used, you'll typically have to make it brief enough so that a busy decision maker will be inclined to read it. Staff members of state or federal legislators usually suggest that when a document exceeds one or two pages in length, the likelihood of its being read drops. In evaluation reporting, less is truly more. Thus, succinct reporting should be your goal when preparing an evaluation report. Eliminate the extraneous information and get to the heart of things. It is impossible to define "brief" in terms of the numbers of pages in an evaluation report. A 25-page evaluation report might be considered brief for a major year-long study of a state's HIV education program. For an evaluation of a one-hour schoolwide assembly dealing with HIV risks, however, a 25-page evaluation report would most likely be considered lengthy. Be guided by the magnitude of the evaluation study itself, then try to be as succinct as is sensible in that situation. Guideline 3: At least two levels of detail should be provided in all evaluation reports. Provide at least two levels of detail. This guideline, aimed at increasing the likelihood that an evaluation report will be used, urges evaluators to always provide two or more degrees of descriptive detail. Suppose, for example, that in accordance with Guidelines 1 and 2 you have prepared a lean, decision-focused evaluation report of eight pages. Your report is, by most standards, quite brief. Even so, you should introduce it with an executive summary of one page or less. Such summaries cut to the core of the study by including only the most important highlights. Creating an accurate and readable executive summary is a challenge, but, because decision makers will often read only an evaluation report's executive summary, it is worthwhile. The three sample evaluation reports provided later in this booklet are introduced by an executive summary. More substantial evaluation studies, such as a lengthy study of HIV-focused staff development provided by a state department of education over a two-year period, may need three levels of reporting: (1) the evaluation report itself, (2) a one-page or executive summary, and (3) a separate technical supplement that describes the procedures, data analysis, and results in more detail. The length of this supplement might run to 40 pages or more. The decision to prepare a separate technical supplement usually depends on the magnitude of the evaluation study and, even more importantly, on the likelihood that decision makers will truly require this information. One of the dividends of separating technical information into its own supplement is that the evaluator avoids including the potentially deflective information in the evaluation report itself. The brevity and focus of the report is maintained and the likelihood that it will be read is increased. Thus, with some exceptions, using one of the reporting plans described below will usually prove satisfactory for evaluators of HIV education programs:
Clearly, the purpose of multilevel reporting is to increase the probability that decision makers will attend to the results of your evaluation study. Guideline 4: Evaluation reports should be as readable as possible. Keep it readable. One important way to strengthen the likelihood of your report's being read is to make it readable. Decision makers are less likely to read a dense, stiffly written 10-page document with no figures, tables, or white space than a well-written 10-page document that features attractive headings, reasonable white space, and several key tables and figures. When you prepare your evaluation report, write directly to your particular audience. Use a writing style and a vocabulary that are at the same level as your audience's reading abilities, dispositions, and interests. Keep the writing direct and simple, and avoid complex terminology. You might want to hire a good editor who can help make the report easier to read and understand. Use graphics and tables whenever possible. Many people will grasp your point more quickly by studying a well-conceived graphic than by reading a written explanation of the same information. Use a variety of headings and subheadings to help the reader follow the report's sequence and see what's coming. Use white space along with the headings to break up the negative visual impact of an unending set of paragraphs. For lengthier reports, be sure to use a table of contents. In short, make the report visually appealing. The essence of Guideline 4 is to increase the readability of an evaluation report so that it will actually be read. There are too many instances of important evaluation studies that never made an impact because the evaluators created documents that were uninviting to the reader. Guideline 5: Offer to provide an oral report about the study. Prepare an oral presentation. Not all decision makers learn best from written reports; many prefer and will be more effectively informed by an oral presentation. An oral report will provide an opportunity for a question-and-answer period that can prove particularly illuminating to the decision makers. If your offer to provide a supplementary oral report is accepted, you will need to prepare it with great care. Your oral report should incorporate each of the previous guidelines: (1) keep your remarks decision focused, (2) cut your presentation to the bone and practice it to make sure that it can be delivered well within your allotted time, (3) begin with a succinct oral "executive summary" of the report's results, and (4) enhance the visual appeal of your report through visual aids and a well-structured oral presentation. Back to Booklet 8 Table of Contents Back
to Handbook for Evaluating HIV Education - Introduction
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