tppevaluationtechnicalassistancewebinar.docVIP

TPP EVALUATION TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE WEBINAR Working together: Program Staff’s Role in Effectiveness Evaluations June 23, 2011 1:00 pm CT Coordinator: Good afternoon and welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time all participants are in a listen only mode. Today’s conference is being recorded. If you have any objections you may disconnect at this time. Now I would like to turn the call over to your speaker, Susan Zief. You may begin. Susan Zief: Thank you. Good afternoon everyone my name is Susan Zief. I’m the Project Director for the Teenage Pregnancy Prevention Evaluation Technical Assistance Contract. Today’s presentation will discuss the critical role that the program staff have in supporting the impact evaluation. The presentations today are organized around two fundamental evaluation objectives that are essential for really being able to demonstrate your program’s true impacts. The first is maintaining the contrast or that difference between the program and the control group. And the second is maintaining the integrity of the random assignment design. We’re focusing on random assignment designs today for two reasons. The primary one being the majority of the independent grantee evaluations are using random assignment. And secondly many of the points that John Deke and Mary Myrick will discuss today count and do apply to other designs such as quasi experimental designs. So I’m very pleased to introduce John Deke and Mary Myrick. John is a Senior Researcher at Mathematica Policy Research. He will first present on finding credible program impacts, and in particular, how to maintain the evaluation in such a way that believable and useful evidence is produced. Mary Myrick is the Founder and President of Public Strategies, an Oklahoma based firm that provides project management as strategic planning services for public and private sector clients. Mary will present on what program staff must do to support a successful e