Assignment 7

Designing an Outcome Evaluation

The Board of Directors of a social services agency asks you to evaluate the effectiveness of a program their organization runs called "Stay in the Game" that seeks to reduce the incidence of high school students dropping out of school. The program does this by having teachers administer a questionnnaire to 10th graders during the fall semester of each year, and then using this survey data together with administrative data on individual student's school attendance, grades and extra curricular activities to identify students "at-risk" for dropping out. These so called at-risk youth are then given special counselling service during the course of the academic year aimed at preventing drop-out.

Please do the following:

1. Develop no more than 3 reseach questions that would be appropriate for this outcome evaluation project.

2. Tell us what the key dependent and independent variables might be.

3. Suggest a reserarch design that would be appropriate (i.e., true experiment, quasi-experiment, natural experiment, naturalistic experiment)

Note: Please assume that you have any needed human subject approvals, and a big research budget.