Evaluation Capacity-Building Plan 2021-2025

Over the past 15 years, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has taken steps to integrate program evaluation into its culture. Namely, it has developed, implemented, and continually refined the process by which it evaluates the relevance and impact of its research programs. Having completed 13 of these reviews, Institute evaluators identified topic areas that NIOSH must continue to cultivate to ensure the relevance and impact of its research in the future.

This NIOSH Evaluation Capacity-Building (ECB) Plan outlines specific needs within those areas and how NIOSH will address them over the five-year period of fiscal years 2021 through 2025.

This document was designed as a learning agenda, as required of federal departments by the Foundations of Evidence-Based Policy Making Act. Therefore, the Plan includes a learning sheet for each topic area, including key learning questions and activities, as well as steps for addressing each key question. Table 1 outlines the key learning questions and activities for all topic areas. Because NIOSH will transition to a learning agenda after completing these steps, formatting the Capacity-Building Plan in this way will create a clear a path toward the next significant evaluation step.

As part of the learning process through implementation of the ECB Plan and external factors such as public health emergencies and legislation, the Institute will update the Plan at the end of each fiscal year.