Our principles

Amplifying Voices through Evidence Based Evaluation

• Listening and understanding participant voices is an important part of how we do our work. We value providing opportunities for participants to share their experiences in a confidential and safe way. We work alongside our partners to help improve projects by communicating this information from participants back to the project team in a useful timeline.

Learning Oriented

• We believe there is always room to grow and improve. Within our team, we do this by supporting and facilitating professional development of team members. As we work with project teams, we use formative evaluation strategies to provide timely and tangible feedback to projects. This leads to continuous improvement both across projects and within our evaluation practice.

Data Driven Practice

• Our evaluation findings and recommendations are evidence based. A large part of evaluating projects includes working with and interpreting quantitative and qualitative data using methods appropriate for each project, and ultimately turning these findings into concrete and useful recommendations.

Integrity and Ethical Practice

• A major priority for our team is serving the community, partners, and participants with high standards of trust, humility, and honesty. We incorporate multiple perspectives in our projects and work to represent them accurately and justly. We also engage in ethical practice by ensuring data is carefully collected, represented, useful, secure and confidential.

Use of Culturally Responsive Evaluation Practices

• Using culturally responsive evaluation practices can better serve the diverse communities with whom we work. We approach our evaluation practices using a culturally responsive lens by engaging in reciprocal collaboration, ensuring transparency in our actions, and working to learn about the communities and cultures with whom we work. Reciprocal collaboration encompasses the idea of shared responsibility for the project across all steps. Transparency includes being as clear as possible in our communication, as well as in the choices we make around representing data.

Collaboration and Communication

• One of the most important aspects of evaluation is how we communicate results and findings with project teams, project participants, and funders. Communication with project teams help support a feedback loop that allows projects to continually improve. Reporting findings back to participants who have provided data, promotes reciprocity and equity. Communicating with funders promotes accountability for our project partners and for our work as evaluators.

We follow the American Evaluation Association (AEA) Guiding Principles for Evaluators: Systemic Inquiry, Competence, Integrity, Respect for People, and Common Good and Equity (2018). We adhere to the Program Evaluation Standards developed by the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation (Yarborough, Shulha, Hopson & Caruthers, 2010): standards for utility, feasibility, propriety, accuracy, and accountability.

For projects that involve human subjects research, we follow guidelines set forth by the federal government regarding the protection of human subjects, working with project PIs to submit research applications for IRB review to NAU’s Human Research Protection Program.