Evaluator Education at the Undergraduate Level: Stories from the Community-based Assessment and Evaluation (CBAE) Program

Abstract Information: The pathways leading to a career in program evaluation are typically non-linear. As a matter of fact, many nascent practitioners have little to no formal training in evaluation when they first ply their trade. Instead, they rely on the knowledge and skills they acquired in other areas, such as the social sciences or education, and retrofit research methodologies from those fields to accommodate the needs of organizations and funders (Stevahn, King, Ghere, & Minnema, 2005). Currently, all academic programs in program evaluation are at the graduate level with certificates and master’s degrees being offered by numerous universities (LaVelle & Donaldson, 2021). This implies that one must be a graduate student to be capable of learning what program evaluation is and how it ought to be practiced. In this paper, we explain how our undergraduate academic certificate in Community-based Assessment and Evaluation (CBAE) has benefitted students and local organizations. We begin by describing the courses that our students are required to complete in order to earn the CBAE certificate. These courses, Introductory Statistics, Advanced Statistics, Tests and Measurement, Grant Writing, and Applied Program Evaluation, mirror the content that is expected of students at the graduate level, and we teach them with the intensity of graduate courses. Next, we turn to the lived experiences of a current student and two alumnae who share the impact CBAE has had on their academic preparation and personal growth. Specifically, they tell their firsthand accounts of coercive assimilation and the fear of being too outspoken about racial/ethnic and cultural matters because faculty might deny them opportunities for networking, research, and letters of recommendation that could be decisive factors when it comes to graduate school admission decisions. They also discuss how culturally responsive evaluation (CRE) provided them with a theoretical grounding for their development as evaluators and helped them to make sense of their own experiences as Latinx students being taught by a faculty that is predominately White. The Program Director of CBAE will also share the history of the CBAE certificate, the opening of the Office of Community-based Research, and the university’s affiliation with the Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment (CREA). The struggle to bring these opportunities to campus attests to the reluctance of many Hispanic-serving Institutions (HSIs) to center Latinx cultures, but also to the perseverance of faculty and students in exercising their agency in the battle for social justice. Our paper concludes with a discussion about the feasibility of undergraduate evaluator education. We acknowledge the difficulties associated with scaffolding students with limited prior knowledge given time constraints and the dominant narratives about statistics being “hard.” However, we also highlight how much success the CBAE program has had over the past six years in producing competent evaluators and attractive applicants for competitive graduate schools. Through dogged determination, an unwavering commitment to the common good, and an immutable will to foster healthy racial/ethnic identities, we created a mechanism by which undergraduate students are being prepared to make significant contributions to the field of evaluation.

Relevance Statement: We have not yet reached the point of saturation with respect to evaluator education. Indeed, the proliferation of evaluator education programs exposes the continuing demand (LaVelle, 2018). However, at present, the only academic programs specifically dedicated to training students for careers in evaluation are at the graduate level. We argue that restricting access to graduate students is a contributing factor to the shortage of evaluators nationwide. With this in mind, our paper aims to accomplish the following: 1.) Defend the idea that undergraduate students can learn to be program evaluators We present the courses required of students in our academic certificate program in Community-based Assessment and Evaluation (CBAE) and show how the courses correspond to those being offered in graduate-level training programs. 2.) Provide attendees with autobiographical narratives from one current and two former students Three of our authors have experiences as students in the CBAE program and will speak to its effectiveness in preparing them for evaluation jobs and graduate school. They will also tell of the difficulties associated with being members of multiply marginalized groups on our campus and how learning culturally responsive evaluation (CRE) helped them to negotiate hostile school environments. 3.) Share the obstacles associated with designing high quality undergraduate evaluator education While creating an undergraduate evaluator education program has some novelty to it, our goal was more ambitious than just showing that it could be done. We started CBAE in response to calls for more options in evaluator education, the needs of local non-profit organizations, and as a means by which to facilitate student critical consciousness. In our paper, we discuss the difficulties we endured in developing a culturally responsive academic program given our campus ecology and how we help students to overcome their fear of quantitative methods and statistics. 4.) Report on the outcomes of our undergraduate evaluator education program More than 50 students have earned a CBAE certificate over the past seven years. Some of our graduates have gained employment doing evaluation or evaluation-related activities, but most have been accepted into graduate programs where their training in evaluation is likely to play a key role. To this point, the two co-authors who are CBAE alumnae were admitted into highly competitive graduate programs and intend on applying what they learned about evaluation in their own work. One will begin a master’s in Higher Education at the University of Michigan and has already secured an internship with a campus center for program evaluation. The other was accepted into the Policy Studies and Urban Education doctoral program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Both will start their programs this fall. If we are to meet the increasing demands for program evaluator professionals, we need to explore the viability of undergraduate evaluator education. Our paper reports on our experiences with one such program, and we alert attendees to the potential benefits, the obstacles that must be overcome to ensure quality control, and the likely outcomes of such a model.