Environment 6: Formative and Real-time Evaluation

The session aimed to explore three questions about real time and formative evaluations:

1. Vision for an understanding of formative and real time evaluation - what is it?
2. What purposes are served? Who are the primary users of the knowledge, what are the risks?
3. What might this function look like for example, scale and scope, approaches, timing and resources?

The discussion was lively and engaging, with a lot of excellent comments from audience members with experience using these types of evaluations. A few takeaways from this informative session include the following: the importance of engaging in the process as critical for learning; the value of branding our activities in a way that encourages participation; the importance of utility and how these evaluations can be incredibly useful especially if timed correctly; and that there is a risk related to maintaining independence, but evaluators can adapt and change to mitigate this risk. The session ended with a call to continue the discussion as we evolve our thinking on using formative and real time evaluations.

Chair: Andy Rowe