Low-Cost Pre-Evaluation of New Educational Programs

摘要

Educational programs are developed to accommodate for new pedagogical findings and evolving curriculums. Methods to evaluate the effectiveness of these programs are typically labour intensive and time consuming — requiring the recruitment of program participants, the execution of the program, the collection of qualitative and quantitative data, and the analysis of results by expert researchers. To directly address the cost of such evaluations, we propose a pre-evaluation method that estimates the expected value of a new educational program before implementing it in practice. This approach allows educators, researchers, and stakeholders to obtain a preliminary assessment of new programs with minimal investment. To demonstrate our approach, we describe a case study that evaluates the impact of a digital storytelling workshop in a rural community.