EVALUATION

Oregon Department of Education

Dual Language Grant Kick-Off Meeting

December 6, 2013

Kathryn Lindholm-Leary, Ph.D.

The RFP for each this project specifically requires an evaluation. The purpose of the evaluation is for: 1) Accountability – Oregon legislature, the Oregon Department of Education, and your local communities; but also for: 2) Feedback about your program – What is working, what needs to be changed or tweaked; 3) Program and classroom implementation – strengths and weaknesses in program structure, instructional practices and strategies; 4) Staff and parent knowledge, satisfaction, and needs; and 5) Student attitudes, beliefs and self-ratings.

  1. Establishing evaluation plans – begin discussion at our first visit, then continue refining
  • We will work together to establish an evaluation plan that includes project-wide common objectives but also project-specific objectives.
  • We will work with each site to address specific issues that a site may want to examine as well taking into consideration whether sites are new or existing, the language(s) at the sites, etc.
  • We will use the Evaluator’s Toolkit for Dual Language Programs as a guide, so if you are new to research and evaluations of programs, you can check outthis Toolkit that Gary Hargett and I developed specifically for dual language programs at
  1. Data and assessment instruments
  • We need some common student background information and program information, and will work with ODE and your district and school sites to gather this data.
  • We need some common assessments to have project-wide dual language outcomes in both languages
  • For example, all projects will use FLOSEM for oral language development in both languages (FLOSEM = Stanford University Foreign Language Oral Skills Evaluation Matrix). There is more information about assessment instruments (and the FLOSEM) in the toolkit referenced above.
  • We are looking into other literacy and math assessments that align with common core and can be collected in both English and the Target language.
  • Some instruments might be site-specific (especially for the Vietnamese program), or will vary depending on the grade level of the students and other factors.
  • As we develop the evaluation plans, we will work on timelines for assessment and data collection

There will be a final evaluation report that will include evaluation outcomes at the end of the project, but also progress reports along the way. When you provide data for your sites, we will analyze the data and provide project-wide and site-specific progress reports.