Evaluation concept

The evaluation of the project is based on the method of randomized controlled trials. Based on this method a total of 15 schools were involved to this investigation.

• The schools, participating in the investigation, are supported with access to the Guidelines & Toolkit, even personal mentoring and financial support, too. The latter one supports mainly the cross-sectoral cooperations in order to have opportunity to involve external experts.
• The 1st control group schools are supported with access to the Guidelines & Toolkit, but they do not have personal mentoring and financial support.
• In the 2nd control group schools there are only data collection activities.

This way of evaluation method gives us opportunity to compare the prevention skills of schools with different levels of support (toolkit and complex institutional development support). In this kind of evaluation we could only investigate and compare the competencies of the institutions and teachers before and after the project both with quantitative and qualitative methods.

Overall aim: evaluation of the change of the institutional capacities of schools in relation to early warning and drop-out prevention. (Evaluation is one component of the project aiming at contribute to the accumulation of knowledge, not the evaluation of the project itself!)

Four key criteria for evaluation:

• Applicability – the availability of resources, know-how and implementation conditions. (pre-selection of specific institutional capacities by project partners, summarized by evaluation)
• Effectiveness – the impact of the use of EWS and prevention measures in comparison to control groups (evaluation)
• Conditions of effectiveness – the contextual factors determining effectiveness at the institutional level (evaluation)
• Scaling-up potential – the contextual factors determining the scaling-up potential of EWS and various prevention measures (i.e. the absorption capacity of schools) at the systemic level. (research and evaluation)

For more information, please, open the Evaluation concept (draft).