Masters of Public
Administration
Program
Evaluation (PA 784)
Spring 2001
(Fall 2002 Syllabus coming soon--please check back!)
Wednesdays 6:10-8:55 PM
Objectives
This course focuses on basic concepts, problems,
and research methods in program evaluation. Public and nonprofit organizations devote
countless hours to the formation of policies and programs to address the many social
issues that affect us. It is imperative,
then, that a means be developed for evaluating whether these programs are successful in
accomplishing the expected results. Beginning
in the 1960s with the War on Poverty, the federal and many state governments required the
evaluation of programs they were funding.
More recently, in light of citizens’
rising expectations as to what government is supposed to accomplish, there has been a
renewed emphasis on measuring program accomplishments.
At all levels of government, and in much of the nonprofit sector, agencies
are now required to specify the outcomes that their programs are expected to produce, and
to devise ways to measure and evaluate the extent to which those outcomes have been
achieved. Program evaluation can be considered a more in-depth form of performance
measurement in that it seeks to do more than measure program outcomes. It is designed to evaluate program operations and
the impact of the program on the target population. The purpose of this class is to
provide you with the knowledge and skills that you need to construct and critique
evaluation designs, collect and analyze data to test the effects of government programs,
and address many of the questions and issues that arise in the process of evaluating
program impacts.
Note: PA 710 is a prerequisite for this
course. Students who have not taken PA 710
may be admitted if they have a basic understanding of research design and quantitative
data analysis techniques, including regression analysis.
