Fernald – monitoring and evaluation

In terms of monitoring and evaluation and what’s important, I would say the key is to monitor and evaluate, because from my perspective as a researcher being able to see the effect of a program, you can’t do that unless you have baseline data, unless you have data collected throughout the process, you cannot do it if you don’t have end line data to look and see the effectiveness. I think it’s easy to lose track of how important it is to monitor and evaluate programs when you’re so wrapped up in the administration of the program itself, but keeping an eye on the fact that being able to show that a program works or doesn’t work is really key to them being able to replicate that program, improve that program etcetera. 

So where I would start in terms of thinking about evaluation of any program is really thinking about what the goals of the program are and what the program is trying to achieve. For example, I might come in and have a really different idea of what a program is supposed to be doing than what the person designing the program or funding the program has, so in terms of thinking about if the goal of this program is, for example, lets say this program was targeted at three to five year olds and really wanted to increase readiness for school. So let’s say we agreed that the outcome was really looking at readiness for school, then what we would do is figure out what are the things in this culture and this context that would make a child ready for school. In some countries and contexts it may differ, but what gets many children ready for school in many countries and in many contexts is literacy, numeracy, knowledge of numbers, knowledge of letters, and some socio-emotional awareness, and some ability in terms of executive function and executive control to inhibit inhibitory control.