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Research and Evaluation

Teach for Health is committed to using research as a means to improve our existing programs, directly benefiting our partners through the feedback and implementation of research results.

Additionally, our programs undergo frequent evaluation by both internal and external sources to ensure that we continually improve our programs.

Why Evaluate?

Evaluation is useful for:

  • Knowing if our organization is on track in meeting goals
  • Determining whether efforts are achieving desired impact
  • Sharing ideas with others
  • Continually assessing whether we are accomplishing our mission: To partner with communities to develop self-directed, cost-effective, and sustainable projects that improve health and well-being.

Formative vs. Summative Evaluation

Formative evaluations help us to improve our activities such as workshops, meetings etc. They are often short term evaluations that let us know if we are generally on track towards achieving our larger goals

Examples of Formative Evaluation Tools:

  • Community visit records: TFH  program assistants visit health promoters in their home community and assess progress, track promoter goals, and offer support
  • Promoter profiles: interviews at set intervals with health promoters to discuss their skills, experience and goals
  • Attendance records: including workshops, and monthly meetings
  • Curriculum evaluation: feedback from our participants on workshop content
  • Meeting topics covered: correlated to identified trends in participant suggestions and areas for improvement from promoter profiles
  • Number of promoters trained at each workshop: meeting basic performance and attendance requirments
  • Retention: Active promoters vs. total trained
  • Program reach: Total number of communities served. Includes a separate metric for identified “high risk” communities

Summative evaluation occurs less frequently, and consists of long term impact evaluations. We assess items such as behavior change, and the biggest question: is health in the communities we work with improved because of our programs. This is often expensive and time consuming, necessitating creative assessment tools.

Summative examples include:

  • META/Action Planning: a foundation for promoter evaluation of self-identified goals
  • Baseline health and economic assessment surveys (cross sectional sampling)
  • Community driven projects: formed from working groups arranged by health promoters, essentially a second level of development beyond our primary staff
Adapted from Bond et al. A Practical Guide to Evaluating Your Own Programs. Chapel Hill, NC: Horizon Research, Inc, chapter 4.

 

The TFH Logic Model

  1. Start with a problem
  2. Look at what inputs you have to solve the problem
  3. List activities you will carry out with those resources and with/for whom
  4. Decide what short term, medium, and long term outcomes make the most sense to track
  5. Examine assumptions and external factors that may influence your outcomes
  6. Evaluate whether or not you’re making it through the process as planned
  7. If not, locate the problem(s), and touble shoot
  8. Identify additional support to help you find solutions if neccesary
  9. Adjust your project to make it better and more effective
  10. Repeat!