HPE 1 Major Assignment
due Friday 14th June, 2019 by 11.59 pm via the LMS Turnitin facility
For the major assignment, students are to develop an evaluation plan for a health program of your choice. Your assignment should be based upon work covered in the sessions and in the readings. It should combine both practice and theory, with attention to appropriate conceptual treatment of the topic.
The length should be approximately 3000-3,500 words with this assignment contributing 70% of your final mark. The evaluation plan will be of most use if it can be related to an area in need of evaluation in your work or your community, but if this is not practicable, we would suggest that you choose to evaluate a health program in an area of expertise or interest.
You will need to consider each of the following aspects in your plan, and make appropriate comments in your assignment about these aspects. Your plan will need to include the following components:
1. Purpose of the evaluation, including background to the program and the health problem it is designed to address;
2. Evaluation question(s) you are planning to ask and a rationale for their selection;
3. Stakeholders and audience for the evaluation;
4. Ethical considerations and how you will deal with them;
5. Program logic – illustrating how the program to be evaluated is assumed to work
6. Evaluative criteria /indicators you will apply in order to make your evaluative judgment, and their source;
7. Evaluation approach(es) you have selected and your rationale for this choice
8. Data collection methods, including the instruments you plan to use, where applicable. Indicate who has developed these instruments. You must also show how the data collection instruments link to the evaluation questions;
9. Evaluation utilisation strategy – you will need to show what approaches you will adopt to enhance the utilisation of the evaluation findings
10. Timeline and Resource allocation (i.e., budget) – you will need to show how you intend to implement your evaluation plan and an indication of what types of resources (e.g., staff, statistician, data analysis, transcribing travel, report production etc) you will require (you do not need to show actual dollar amounts).
NB. You will need to show in your plan that you have consulted the literature related to your program and your evaluation strategy.
Advice regarding your major assignment:
• Select and develop an idea for an evaluation plan -if necessary email the course coordinator to clarify the scope and feasibility of your plan.
• Prepare a simplified outline of your plan in dot point form, maximum of one page. There will be an opportunity throughout the course for your lecturer and other students to offer critical and constructive suggestions or advice.
• The actual evaluation plan is important, your assessor will be keen to see you linking your plan to the concepts we have covered in this course of study. Please provide a brief rationale for each decision you make in putting together your evaluation plan.
• To conform to the intellectual honesty requirements of postgraduate study and professional evaluation, please distinguish between your original work and that of others by correctly acknowledging the work of others. Please note that this includes mentioning that a work team may have brainstormed a series of evaluation questions, or that a data analysis instrument was developed elsewhere.
• There needs to be a strong relationship between your evaluation questions and your data collection approach. Some students have found it beneficial to include a matrix that links the evaluation questions and the data collection techniques.