After-School Initiative's Toolkit for Evaluating

Using This Toolkit
As part of their evaluation technical assistance to ASI grantees, NRC provides an evaluation liaison for each ASI program. The evaluation
liaison serves as a consultant to guide and assist program staff to develop a program logic model, identify the program’s youth development
outcomes, develop a survey and survey administration protocol, and understand and use the results of the survey.
With their evaluation liaison, staff at each after-school program should review the outcome domains and question sets provided in this
toolkit and determine whether they are applicable to their program. In addition, staff should consider whether the question sets reflect the
youth development outcomes that individual programs are working toward according to their logic model. Once outcome domains and
question sets are chosen, NRC, through the evaluation liaisons’ communication with ASI programs, will customize surveys for programs
electronically. Liaisons will help ASI programs determine the most appropriate dates for survey administration and develop protocol for
administration. Then, after program staff administers the surveys to their youth participants, completed surveys will be sent to NRC for
analysis. Finally, within a few months of administration, evaluation liaisons will meet with their assigned ASI programs to review the data
results and discuss ways of using their data for program improvement.
Recruitment, Incentives and Consent
Determine who should be recruited to complete the survey: Every youth in fourth through ninth grades participating in after-school
programs funded by ASI is eligible to be a survey respondent. Whenever possible, all eligible participants should be asked to complete the
survey. If resources permit, it is easier to survey all participants to avoid designing special data collection methods that survey only a
representative sample of participants. If resources do not permit, the evaluation liaison should help program staff determine a sampling
method. Appendix II provides instructions for developing a sampling scheme for those programs unable to survey all participants.
Decide if incentives will be offered: Program staff needs to decide if incentives will be offered as part of the survey administration
process. Appendix III provides more information on the use of incentives to increase participation in evaluation.
Obtain consent and assent for the evaluation: The consent and assent forms are designed to protect evaluation participants by
informing them of their rights as well as any risks and benefits that may occur as a result of participation in the evaluation. Participants
must understand what the evaluation is about and what they are being asked to do. Program staff is required to have a signed current
consent and assent form on file for each participant in the evaluation.
Before an ASI program collects data from youth – even if it is anonymous – program staff must have a consent form signed by a parent or
guardian of each youth on file. The consent form is intended to describe the risks and benefits of participation in the evaluation and to give
Toolkit for Evaluating Positive Youth Development 5