Evaluation questions

You probably have some idea of why you are conducting an evaluation—possibly one of the reasons listed in What is an evaluation? For instance, evaluations can directly affect future actions or decisions or change someone’s attitude or way of thinking. Evaluation questions transform a vague idea into specific elements that are tied to one or more outcomes and can be measured through assessments.

All evaluations answer the same three fundamental questions, according to the Principal Investigator’s Guide:

1. What? (What happened or happens and what are the results?)

2. So what? (Why did the results occur the way they did, and what are the implications?)

3. Now what? (What actions, decisions, or recommendations can be made based on the results?)

Evaluation question do’s and don’ts

DON’T	DO
Ask more questions than you have time or resources to answer	Prioritize questions based on the value of their answers and your ability to answer them
Come up with all the questions yourself	Talk to stakeholders for their input
Try to answer all questions from every stakeholder	Use stakeholder input to inform the evaluation design, not determine it
Ask questions that are too broad or aspirational	Ask questions that can be answered realistically

EVALUATION QUESTION EXAMPLES

How financially sustainable is the robotics lab?

Does the robotics lab help teens develop collaboration skills?

Types of evaluations

EVALUATION TYPE	DESCRIPTION	EXAMPLES
Front-end evaluation	Used in informal science education; similar to audience or user research and used to inform the initial design of a program.	What aspects of this topic are our youth interested in?
Formative evaluation	Periodic evaluations conducted during the development and implementation of a program. Used for course-correcting if necessary. Formative evaluation can look at how a project is progressing towards its goals whether the implementation of the project going according to plan.	Are participants learning what we expected?
Summative evaluation	Focuses on conditions at the end of the program and is an evaluation of the entire process. It may report results from earlier formative evaluations as well.	Did participants learn what and as much as we wanted?