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.
The steps:
You and your staff are coming together to decide on the best cookie.
Each participant gets a sheet of paper and something to write with. Instruct the participants to divide their sheet of paper, like this:
As a group, decide on what criteria you will judge the cookies on, and the standards that will help to measure the cookie’s performance.
Next, fill out the first three columns with the identified criteria, standards and performance measures. Here’s an example:
Now, let’s examine each cookie based on what you’ve established. If you’re like me, you’ll want to test out each cookie but taking a bite, or you can just examine with your eyes and fingers.
Take notes on how you examine each cookie, the decisions you make, and any challenges you experience during eating testing. Here’s the completed sheet for one cookie (double chocolate chip):
Repeat the steps for the remaining cookie brands.
Let’s process what we have:
This exercise is adapted from “Building Evaluation Capacity: Activities for Teaching and Training (Second Edition)” by Hallie Preskill and Darlene Russ-Eft.
The purpose of this evaluative thinking activity is to determine which cookie is the best based on your criteria and standards.
While a cookie may or may not have passed your standards, it’s not about you.
In evaluation terms, you want to develop a program you believe will meet the needs of your program’s intended participants. We tend to base this on various factors, including current events, behavioral change theories, anecdotal feedback, learning objectives, funding requests, etc.
Now, go back to your sheet. You did this activity based on what you and your staff came up with. Consider this: Will the criteria and standards you all agreed on meet the needs of the people who will have to eat the cookies?
What’s great about this activity is that you’ll realize that the cookie that passes the test (if any) for your staff and funders may not be the cookie your intended participants will actually want to eat. Maybe you didn’t think about creating criteria for gluten-free cookies, but through evaluating the cookies and getting feedback from participants, you find some folks have a gluten allergy (or are vegan, can’t eat butter or eggs, etc.)
Key takeaway
This is a fun way to practice evaluative thinking and apply some critical thinking into why we create programs and services, the criteria and standards we set, and how we can tailor the program/service based on participant feedback. Try this activity and let me know how it goes for you.
Raise Your Voice: How can you use The Cookie Exercise with your staff and students? Share below in the comments section.
