Summary and Analysis of Extension Program Evaluation in R

Goals of this book

The goal of this book is to introduce to students interested in extension education, outreach, and public education to the quantitative methods used to assess the evaluation of these activities. Extension education includes a diverse collection of subject matter, including environmental science, home horticulture, agriculture, youth development, nutrition, and financial literacy.

Tools for evaluating educational programs may include in-class surveys that measure the knowledge gain of students in a course or follow-up surveys to determine the behaviors adopted by course participants. The evaluation may also include any number of measured variables, perhaps the age of youth participants, the number of calories eaten daily by students in a nutrition program, or the organic matter content of farm fields managed by participating farmers.

The examples and methods here are chosen specifically to be applicable to the evaluation of extension education programs. That being said, these methods are some of the most common used in the analysis of experiments—techniques used from diverse disciplines from manufacturing to environmental science to psychology, though each of these disciplines has additional methods used in specific situations.

Specific learning goals

One goal of this book is to give readers the skills and abilities to be able to understand the graphs and statistics that you might encounter in a publication such as the Journal of Extension or other academic reports of program results. As examples, students will be able to answer the questions: What can I conclude from this bar plot? How do I interpret this p-value? What is an r-squared value?

A second goal is for readers to be able to design and analyze their own program evaluation experiments in order to document the impacts of their extension teaching or research. What analysis would I use to assess knowledge gain with before-and-after surveys? What statistics should I report to convey the results of this analysis? Can I explain the results with a graph?