Learning and Evaluation/Archive/Learning modules/2Summative Evaluation

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Part 1. Overview: Program Evaluation Basics Overview; A Note about Words; What is a Program?; Understanding Programs; What is Program Evaluation?; Why is evaluation important?
Part 2. Stages of Evaluation: The Cycle and Stages of Evaluation; The Tasks of Each Evaluation Stage
Part 3. Types of Evaluation: Types of Evaluation; Needs Assessment; Feasibility Assessment; Monitoring; Context Evaluation; Formative/Process Evaluation; Summative Evaluation; Impact Evaluation
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Program Evaluation Basics Menu

Summative Evaluation

Stages Involved

Completion & Feedback		Identification

Implementation		Design

Key question:

What was accomplished?

Looks at whether a program's objectives were met after the program timeline is complete.
Provides evidence to inform judgments about a program's worth and future direction.

Summative evaluations are most used for sharing results from recent programs on blogs, reports, or other media. They tend to be the face of program results because the data analysis is more straight forward and focuses on short-term and intermediate outcomes (such as number of participants or measuring interest in uploading photos in the near future.)

Evaluation in Action: A Summative Evaluation

Once the chapter's Wiki Loves Monument ends, they want to know whether they have met their overall objectives for the event and whether the chapter should continue investing time, energy, and resources toward this new event.

A summative evaluation is a summary of activities, actions and outputs produced from a program. For the Wiki Loves Monuments program, their goal was to upload 5,000 images of monuments around the world, with about 1,000 new monuments from 20 smaller towns. Did they meet these goals? Did they engage the number of users they had intended? How many did they engage and what were the characteristics of participants (i.e. their hometown, age, etc.)? Was it worth it to spend funds for participants to travel?

The results from the summative evaluation were presented in the chapter's annual report and was made available to the public to demonstrate the work that the chapter had done the previous year. The report helped to spread the word about the program's short-term and intermediate outcomes.