Examples of the factors that can influence outcomes include:
- Demographic characteristics (age, gender, income, education level,
etc.). This information can help you identify if certain
categories of students are achieving desired outcomes
while others aren’t.
For example, perhaps female students are achieving less success than
male students. It isn’t likely to simply be the fact that they
are female; there are likely other contributing factors such as childcare
or transportation that come into play. Your evaluation should also help
you identify some of the specific needs and barriers facing students
in your program – that’s certainly one of the benefits
of evaluation!
- “Hard-to-serve” clients. Achievement of outcomes
can be affected by how easy or how hard it is to help certain students.
For
example, when Ontario Works was first created, success
rates were fairly high because participants with fewer barriers
and higher skills levels
moved fairly quickly through the system. However, as
time has passed, the harder-to-serve group may still be dealing
with issues other than
literacy and haven’t achieved the desired outcomes as rapidly
as others did. For example, they could have health
issues or family issues they need to take care and that are a higher
priority than education
at this point in time. This doesn’t mean that programming is
less effective, but it does mean that contributing
factors have to be taken
into account and perhaps outcome targets will need
to be modified.
- Geographical considerations (neighbourhood or town,
distance, travel, rural or urban). Similar to demographic
considerations, this information can help you identify
if a certain group of clients
is achieving more or fewer outcomes than another.
If five or six learners live near to each other and
get together in the
evening for a homework
club, this could impact positively on outcomes achievement.
Or if certain learners live quite far from the program,
they may miss sessions because
of transportation issues. This could impact negatively
on outcomes achievement.
- How the service was delivered (small group versus
1:1 or mandatory versus voluntary learners). Programs
that offer both small
group and 1:1 tutoring might notice that one type
of learner is consistently achieving outcomes faster
than the other. This does not necessarily
indicate that one type of service delivery is better
than the other, but it could mean that outcome
targets should be adjusted
to reflect
the differences in time spent learning.
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