| Roundtable: Getting Your Findings in Use: Making Evaluation Results Relevant, Accessible and Understandable |
| Roundtable Presentation 774 to be held in Suwannee 21 on Saturday, Nov 14, 10:55 AM to 11:40 AM |
| Sponsored by the Evaluation Use TIG |
| Presenter(s): |
| Anita Drever, Wyoming Survey and Analysis Center, adrever@uwyo.edu |
| Laura Feldman, University of Wyoming, lfeldman@uywo.edu |
| Abstract: Evaluators often put great effort into writing accurate and comprehensive reports that end up gathering dust on the shelves of the stakeholders they were intended to serve. Even when program managers or other interested parties read the report, findings that could have improved policy and programming get overlooked or misinterpreted. This roundtable will be a 'show-and-tell' forum for evaluators to discuss strategies they have used to make results relevant to practitioners' contexts. We will discuss examples of successful report formats, effective use of the internet to disseminate results, strategies to communicate complex statistical or theoretical concepts to lay audiences, and the dilemmas evaluators face when forced to choose between precision and comprehension by a lay audience. We would like to encourage roundtable participants to bring examples of their work, if they are available. |