Evaluative thinking involves identifying assumptions, posing thoughtful questions, pursuing deeper understanding through reflection and perspective-taking and making informed decisions in program planning, implementation, and evaluation.

It’s a key component to building evaluation capacity within an organization, company, or other entity. While I still conduct evaluations for clients, I’m finding myself more drawn to helping organizations build up this capacity so they can do it all themselves.

The primary reasons organizations conduct evaluations is to find out if 1) the program is meeting the needs of its intended audience(s), 2) if it’s financially feasible to maintain the program or service as is or if it needs to be scaled up or down, or 3) if it should be scrapped altogether.

It’s not enough for your staff to know the ins and outs of doing an evaluation. They need to harness the ability to think evaluatively about the programs they’re developing.

And what better way to try this out than with cookies?

Grab 3 different brands of cookies and let’s get started.

This activity is ideal for:

• Anyone responsible for developing, running and evaluating programs and services
• Students interested in evaluative thinking

Here’s what you need:

• If you’re the baking type: Bake three different types of the same cookie (using different chips or filling, different ingredients, etc.)
• If you’re the store-bought type: Buy 3 different brands of the same cookie type. In order for this to work, the brands cannot have any recognizable marks in the design that will give clues on who makes them. In other words, you can have 3 brands of cookies that look like Oreos, as long as each brand doesn’t have “Oreo” labeled on them (we’re trying to avoid biases here)
• Sheets of paper
• Writing utensils (pens, pencils, markers)

As a heads-up: You don’t have to eat the cookies. But you might, for testing purposes.