“Throughout my career I’ve seen how powerful program evaluation can be when it is done well. For example, a few years back I was project director for a program called STEM Pathways—a collaborative effort between five organizations providing science programming for the same six schools. Much about our program evaluation experience sticks with me: how important it was to involve program staff efficiently and effectively in evaluation design, implementation of findings, and interpretation to decision-making—and how they were empowered by being part of the process; how program evaluation led us to discover things that were surprising and that we would not have otherwise learned; and how the data-informed program improvements we made led to better participant outcomes and program staff satisfaction.”      READ MORE