ADDIE: Evaluation

When we start a road trip, we know we’ve completed our drive when we reach our destination. When you start a book, you know the story is over when you’ve read the last page. But when we set out to solve a problem with education, how do we know we’ve accomplished our goal? Evaluation, the final stage of the ADDIE model, is our tool to ensure we’ve done what we set out to do.

“Evaluation helps us to determine whether our instructional implementation was effective in meeting our goals” (Ritzhaupt et. al., 2022). Evaluation can be accomplished many ways and at different parts of our learning process. It’s essential to complete, though, to ensure we’re meeting the learning goals and objectives we defined in our course early in the ADDIE model.

There are three main types of evaluation: formative, summative, and confirmative (Ritzhaupt et. al., 2022).

“Formative evaluation is the process of ongoing evaluation throughout the design process for the betterment of design and procedure within each stage” (Ritzhaupt et. al., 2022). In this type of evaluation, you’re really looking at the whole picture. You want to use many different types of data from many different types of sources to thoroughly evaluate the project. For our volunteer education example, this may look like gathering insight and feedback from our state 4-H staff, other region program managers, as well as our adult volunteers.

Summative evaluations flip the script and focus on evaluating the learner (Ritzhaupt et. al., 2022). We’ll want to explore effectiveness of the process on learning for our students as well as the cost-effectiveness for our methods. Thinking of our example, when we evaluate on the summative level we may find that our in-person, overnight training could have been done online or both online and in-person for a fraction of the original cost. Therefore, moving the course online would increase the cost-effectiveness for both the organization and the learner.

Finally, “confirmative evaluation seeks to answer questions about the learner and the context for learning” (Ritzhaupt et. al., 2022). We want to explore whether or not the course we developed is providing value after the completion of the learning activities for our participants.

How you gather feedback and evaluate your course will depend on what exactly you need to be evaluating. You may conduct one-on-one interviews, pass out surveys, or submit your materials for expert review.

Remember, your evaluation isn’t a reflection of your value as an instructional designer. If your evaluation does not come back as impactful as you had hoped, this step is the opportunity for you to make changes and adjustments to the parts of the course you created in the ADDI phases. Evaluation helps you continue to better your work across the board and strengthen your skillset.

Well, there you have it – the ADDIE model. Analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. Hopefully this series has provided you with some insight as to how easily this process can be broken down and applied to the uncharged waters of learning and education – regardless of what industry you’re in.

Sources:

Ritzhaupt, A. D. A., Nor Hafizah Beatt, OwenCalhoun, CherylDavis, RobertEichler, Brittany

E.Lee, Brenda R.Nichols, JamesSahay, ShilpaSalama, Christine D.Walsh,

SharonWildberger, WilliamWilson, MatthewYaylaci, Muhammed. (2022). ADDIE

Explained. Retrieved 6/14/2022 from http://www.oercommons.org/courses/addie-

explained-an-open-educational-resource-for-the-educational-technology-

community/view