Program evaluation is an important priority for all libraries of any type.
Without a formal evaluation process, a library will never know whether the hard work that staff put into a program meets the community’s need.
The evaluation process should also allow the library to document the impact that its services are having on the community as a whole and allow the library staff to communicate that impact to its stakeholders.
The questions should directly ask if the attendees learned something. The questions should ask if the attendees plan to make a change in personal attitude, individual actions, level of knowledge in the subject, or personal perceptions of an issue. They should be focused on the outcome. Basically, are the attendees going to do something different?
Try to keep it simple. But ask!
PA Forward®’s training team has developed a simple set of questions which we are asking you to submit to the attendees of at least one of you programs to see if your attendees learned something and will use this new knowledge. We ask that you create a survey with at least these four questions and use a Likert Scale (Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, Strongly Disagree, NA) for the attendees to answer the questions.
The four questions are:
- I learned something by participating in the library activity.
- I feel more confident about what I just learned.
- I intend to apply what I just learned.
- I am more likely to use other library resources & services.
We have developed an easy way to submit the results of your evaluation. It can be found at this link:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PAF2024AE
The survey asks the library name, the title of the program, the date of the program, total number of attendees, primary literacy which the program targeted (just pick one). The number of responses to each of the four questions above and we ask for an optional answer to this question:
- Please share any success stories or verbal/observational evaluation you conducted.
Why do we ask for some of these questions? We are looking to build an evaluation of the impact of PA Forward® Statewide by taking the results of evaluations at individual libraries and aggregate on a statewide basis.