Literacy Basics - Community Literacy of Ontario

Choosing Indicators

After you have chosen the outcomes you are going to examine in your evaluation, the next step is to identify at least one indicator that will provide the concrete data for each outcome. Ask yourself, “What might I see, hear and/or read about our agency’s students that indicates the outcome has been achieved?”

Outcome indicators must be both observable and measurable. You have to be able to identify them and count them. “Making a difference” is not an outcome, but “improved banking skills” is because it can be observed and measured. through indicators such as “completing deposit and withdrawal transactions”. Outcomes must also be unambiguous – terms such as “many”, “substantial” and “adequate” are not specific enough to use as indicators. Include numbers and percentages of participants (e.g. 25, or 30% of our clients, will meet their LBS goal this year). You will likely be able to use existing sources of information such as the IMS data to address many of the indicators you choose.

Like anything else, it will take some time and experience to become familiar with identifying outcome indicators. Start by choosing specific, observable accomplishments or changes that can tell you if each outcome has been achieved. Ask yourself how YOU would know – but remember to think in terms of measurable observations. Be sure to include the statistic(s) that summarize the program’s performance for that particular outcome. For example, if you are measuring improved banking skills, you can document how many times students successfully use an ATM machine or conduct banking transactions.

Be sure to draw on your knowledge about working with learning outcomes. When you are creating demonstrations and listing the skills incorporated in those outcomes, you are identifying a set of indicators. The terminology may be a bit different, but the concepts are the same. Think about learning demonstrations … we observe a learner using his or her new skills and we measure their success at doing it. We do the same thing when tracking program outcomes.

Examples of indicators

To get a sense of how to choose indicators, let’s look at the outcomes we identified earlier and establish indicators for each of them.

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