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Session Title: Issues Impacting the Quality of Program Evaluation and Programs Serving Youth and Young Adults With Significant Disabilities
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Panel Session 549 to be held in MISSION B on Friday, Nov 12, 10:55 AM to 11:40 AM
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Sponsored by the Special Needs Populations TIG
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| Chair(s): |
| Michael Du, Human Development Institute, zdu@email.uky.edu
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| Discussant(s):
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| Brent Garrett, Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE), bgarrett@pire.org
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| Abstract:
This session will focus on two presentations each of which deals with quality and evaluation in a distinctive manner. One presentation will discuss the issues that arise impacting the quality of evaluation findings in collecting badly needed interview data from youth and young adults with significant cognitive disabilities. It will also provide information on the strategies developed by evaluators to resolve these issues and to obtain interview data that allowed for developing the stories of participants’ experiences in the program in these participants’ own voices. The second presentation will focus on what evaluation findings reveal about a range of challenges which emerged during efforts to administer and implement the program that affected the quality of the program to serve children with significant developmental disabilities in ways consistent with the needs of these children. The purpose of the presentation is to explore what evaluation findings tell us about one program’s efforts to serve children with developmental disabilities using structures and implementation practices used in serving typically developing children and/or children with mild to moderate disabilities. The presentations are related in that each will discuss issues that arise in part due to the need for evaluators to grasp the unique and distinctive lived experiences of groups served by the programs being evaluated. This need is the background against which quality plays out in evaluation practice in one case and in the other case, in insights regarding inconsistencies between program structure and implementation on one hand and participant needs and characteristics on the other.
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Interviewing Individuals with Significant Disabilities: Considerations for Quality
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| Chithra Perumal, Human Development Institute, chithra.perumal@uky.edu
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| Kayla Davidson, Human Development Institute,
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Very often evaluations of programs that serve individuals with moderate and significant disabilities does not includes the voices of the people who are most impacted by it. Approval from institutional review boards for vulnerable populations can be a tedious and protracted process. Additionally, sometimes the responses can be short and may lack the ‘rich’ conversations which contain a wealth of data. In this presentation, the evaluators will discuss their experience in evaluating a program that serves students with developmental and significant disabilities in post-secondary educational settings. More specifically, the presentation will discuss the evaluators’ experience in interviewing individuals with significant disabilities. The presentation will discuss the strategies that they have used to ensure that the ‘voice’ and ‘perspectives’ of the individuals are a key part of the evaluation. The presentation will also include the approaches used in the evaluation to develop stories of the individuals’ experiences in the program based on their voices and the meanings and understandings this experience has for them. Chithra Perumal, lead presenter, has had extensive experience in evaluating programs serving persons with disabilities and in the use of naturalistic qualitative methods in her evaluations. Therefore, she has the capacity to bring to this presentation experience and competencies enabling her to treat the subject matter in a particularly insightful manner.
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Challenges to the Quality of Mentoring Programs Serving Children With Significant Developmental Disabilities: What Evaluation Findings Tell Us
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| Joanne Farley, Human Development Institute, joanne.farley@uky.edu
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This presentation will focus on what evaluation findings said about the quality of a program created to provide mentoring services to children with significant developmental disabilities. Mentoring programs have long been found to positively contribute to a range of outcomes for children (e.g., strengthening social skills, improving academic attainment, making healthier decisions, and improving appropriate behavior at school, within the family and within community settings). However, for a variety of reasons, mentoring programs rarely serve children with significant developmental disabilities. Evaluators at the Human Development Institute, University of Kentucky, had the opportunity of evaluating one mentoring program which decided to create a program component in which community mentors were matched with children with significant developmental disabilities. The evaluation began a year and a half into this program’s implementation and continued over a six month period. The evaluation relied primarily on analysis of existing data collected by the mentoring program and evaluators’ extensive interviewing of program personnel, mentors in matches with children with developmental disabilities, and caregivers of children with developmental disabilities involved in program mentoring matches. The findings that resulted from evaluation activities identified a number of issues related to program structure and implementation that affected the quality of the program’s ability to serve the needs of children with developmental disabilities, the community mentors, and children’s caregivers. This presentation will discuss those issues which were identified that have a high probability of confronting the start-up and implementation of other mentoring programs attempting to serve children with significant developmental disabilities. The presentation will also discuss with regard to some of these issues, strategies and practices found by other mentoring programs newly serving this population to be effective in resolving or limiting the negative consequences of issues or challenges. While this presentation will describe in detail the evaluation design and methods used in this evaluation, it will give predominant attention to the results of the evaluation and what these results had to say about the threats to program quality that emerged in serving children with significant developmental disabilities. Joanne Farley has more than twenty years of experience in evaluating programs serving a range of diverse populations including groups with significant disabilities. Having conducted formative and summative and process and outcome as well as comprehensive evaluations of programs, she has developed extensive expertise in evaluating the alignment of program structures and implementation strategies with program performance in meeting the needs of diverse participant groups.
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