Grant Guru

Breaking down your project into components will assist you in developing your evaluation plan. As you look at each component of your project you will be able to determine your results.

For example, let's say you wish to develop a project for middle school students. These students have poor writing skills and you want to address their needs by developing a series of activities to get these students to write more and revise their work. Developing a needs statement is fairly straightforward. Read the following example.

The ability to write effectively is vital in today's world. Writing is a survival skill in all aspects of K-12 and college instruction as well as an important social skill, enabling communication by email and letter. Writing is a source of voice and empowerment in a democratic society. Writing is a creative mode of self-expression. Writing is a life skill, needed to get a job, perform at a job, and advance. Writing is thinking. Students reflect, analyze and reconsider while they write. However, "in today's schools, writing is a prisoner of time." (The National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges, 2003).

Writing is increasingly shortchanged in the language arts classroom. Students need frequent practice, opportunities to revise their work and authentic feedback to develop writing skills. The recent National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges reports that students spend three hours a week or less on writing assignments; 15% of the time they spend watching television. The National Assessment of Educational Progress research reports that at grades four, eight, and twelve, about one student in five produces completely unsatisfactory prose, about half meet "basic" requirements and only one in five is "proficient." Middle school teachers understand the need to increase writing frequency and provide writing instruction and assignments so that students develop proficiency; however, the daunting task of correcting 150 papers curtails the number of assignments in any given week.

If this sounds like a polished opening to a proposal, it is. This is the opening to a 2.2 million dollar Enhanced Education Through Technology grant that I was awarded and am currently implementing.

I use this as an example to illustrate the various components of a proposal that will assist in determining results. For this project, I needed to evaluate the results of the program (on students and staff) and also meet a series of goals. The participant groups includes students, their teachers, and a group of coach/mentors to assist in implementing the program. My student group consists of approximately 4,000 students in grades 6, 7 and 8 in thirteen K-8 elementary schools. The second group consists of approximately 90 language arts teachers at these schools. The third group, is a group of 19 coach-mentors, a subset of the 90 language arts teachers, who will assist in guiding the project.

In addition to the participating groups, there are also a series of goals. The first is to increase proficiency in writing. The second is to provide extensive access to computer resources to lower the student to computer ratio. The third goal is to increase communication and collaboration among home, school and community to support and improve student learning.

Getting students to write more in grades 6, 7 and 8 require teachers to teach more writing skills, assign more writing and grade more papers. For a teacher with five classes a day, if each student writes one paper a week, the teacher now has over 150 papers a week to read, comment and return. If each paper takes fifteen minutes to score, a teacher would need to find 2,250 minutes or 37.5 hours a week to complete this task. Is it any wonder that students don't write more?

This particular project incorporates the student and teacher use of an on-line writing tool known as MyAccess by Vantage. The project provides the use of the prompt-driven, web-based writing environment (Vantage Learning's online writing development tool). Each week (and often more), student writing responses are analyzed and scored with the assistance of Vantage's Intellimetric artificial intelligence-based electronic essay scoring system. Vantage provides immediate instructional feedback allowing teachers to conduct early diagnosis and assign writing more frequently.

Each target group and project goal has its own set of intended results. Each project goal has an evaluation plan. The goal to increase writing proficiency is measured by standardized writing assessments, teacher evaluations and intellimetric scoring. To determine the extent that students have access to technology, I choose to look at milestone points in time to compare student to computer ratios. To measure the effectiveness of increased home and school collaboration, my evaluation plan includes opinion data of students, teachers, and parents.

As you can see, there is no one way or a right way to do conduct your evaluation and determine results. Grant programs are complex and require you to evaluate component parts. Next week, we will look at two evaluation models to assist you and add to your toolkit of evaluation strategies.