September 2010 marked the beginning of WPE’s Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) efforts. WPE’s M&E work serves several purposes, including quantifying many of the observations made by staff and volunteers, providing a needs assessment to schools to help determine areas for improvement, and serving as benchmarks to track educational outcomes as a result of our programming. Below, I have highlighted the M&E accomplishments of the 2010-2011 school year with the help of consultants and volunteers.
Needs Assessment. Earlier this year our consultants lead incredibly in-depth evaluation and needs assessment efforts at both Manye and NAP. These efforts focused on the collection of survey and direct assessment information from students, opinion data from teachers, as well as observational assessments of classroom quality. These data have been wonderfully helpful to the consultants in helping them to develop appropriate, targeted programming. We have also been able to use our findings to provide formal, written reports to headmasters at both schools that include summary data as well as suggestions for future areas of improvement. Hopefully this information will allow headmasters, teachers, parents, and staff to make progress toward achieving our mutual goals of improving the quality and availability of education in these contexts.
Research and Reporting. One of the most important aspects of needs assessment is disseminating results to the right people. In addition to providing reports to the schools themselves, WPE also had the opportunity to present our findings in the form of a research poster at the Society for Research in Child Development (SRDC) in Montreal, Canada in April of this year. The poster highlighted results of the student surveys done at Manye, and revealed interesting relationships between students’ internal and external motivation, their school attendance, and their performance on end-of-term exams. The SRDC meeting provided an excellent opportunity to interact with academics, policy makers, and practitioners, and share WPE’s important work. This July, I had the privilege to spend a month in Ghana to follow up on this research and interview parents and students about their motivations and opinions toward education, as well as the financial and practical barriers that might prevent them from accessing educational resources they need to succeed. This work is being supported by a grant from New York University, and will hopefully be used to inform not only WPE’s work in Ghana, but also other NGOs’ efforts in similarly under-served African context.
Thanks again to all of you for your continued commitment to WPE and the education of children in our partner communities. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or would like more information about our M&E efforts.