Choosing what to measure

When you know the question that needs to be answered, the next step is to decide how to answer it. The factor that you will measure in order to help answer the question is called an indicator. For instance, you may want to know if participating in a program helps participants become more confident in the use of photo editing software. What you want to know is the level of participants’ confidence in using the software, but that isn’t directly measurable in the way the number of attendees is. You may decide to measure participants’ self-reported increase in confidence (by using a feedback survey, perhaps) or demonstrations of confident behavior that you observe. Using assessments for both measures will provide a more complete picture of the situation.

INDICATOR EXAMPLES

Participants’ performance on a number of questions at the end of the program

The number of times participants form collaborative groups in a lab session

Teen’s behaviors and conversations when collaborating