Jennifer Iriti & Michelle Miller-Adams
Overview
Promise programs across the country vary significantly in their broad purposes, but tend to have at their core one or more of the following three goals:
- Catalyze improvements in the pre-K-12th grade system;
- Improve students’ postsecondary enrollment, persistence, and degree attainment; and/or,
- Stimulate economic and community development.
Despite these variations in program goals, many Promise leaders, funders, and stakeholder share an interest in monitoring and evaluating the progress of the program. This tool has been developed by Jennifer Iriti of the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research & Development Center and Michelle Miller-Adams of the W.E. Upjohn Institute and Grand Valley State University, with generous support from the Lumina Foundation. The goal is to help those considering Promise programs or those with established programs think about how to measure progress and impact. We draw on our own work in our respective Promise communities as well as the Promise research base to provide a consolidated summary of approaches to measurement and specific indicators that could be tracked.
The overall Monitoring and Evaluation Framework includes information and resources for the following important components of developing a useful measurement plan for a Promise program. (These topics are presented in sequential order of how we think one might go about creating such a plan):
- Articulating the program theory of change
- Understanding program implementation timeline
- Documenting programmatic interventions
- Identifying appropriate indicators
- Reviewing example data dashboards
- Planning for when to measure
- References for Promise Monitoring and Evaluation Framework
We hope that this tool is useful to you and your colleagues as you develop and implement your Promise program. Please contact us if we can be of any assistance: Jennifer Iriti or Michelle Miller-Adams