In support of the overall aims of the Institute for Translational and Clinical Research (IICTR), the Tracking and Evaluation (TE) team will rigorously evaluate all research and educational activities within the Institute as a whole, and specifically for each of the key functions that comprise IICTR. Broadly our activities will focus to help the project in:
- Grant Reporting / Renewal
- Service Improvement
- "Intrinsic" Evaluation
- "Transformation"
- National Evaluation conducted by the NIH
Our overall evaluation design is represented by what is called a logic model. This model has helped us in setting out a detailed self-evaluation plan to assess implementation achievement of short-term and long-term goals. This plan will guide us to implement a variety of assessment activities to monitor the progress of IICTR over the next five years. These activities will track:
- Program activities
- Development of trainees, scholars and their mentors
- Implementation of pilot projects
- Involvement of the trainees and faculty with multidisciplinary research
Tracking of these activities through novel data sources and ‘stories of transformation’ will help us determine our success in establishing a transformative and integrative academic home for clinical and translational science. Some of the measures that will be used to evaluate the different processes and outcomes are:
- Web data
- Request forms
- Surveys
- Structured Observations and
- Interviews
The evaluation team is committed to demystifying the process of designing and conducting evaluations by helping individuals to understand the components of evaluation design and implementation. To introduce innovative evaluation methodology in the evaluation process we have access to experts in program evaluation, process evaluation, and outcomes evaluation - all of which are relevant to provide guidance and feedback to aid the evaluation process not only in the classroom, but also at the program- and institution-levels as exemplified by the IICTR.
Along with a commitment to evaluation, the team strives to focus on conducting meaningful, well-designed, publishable, research as another component of its efforts and strategy to develop faculty into active and productive education scholars. The Tracking and Evaluation (TE) plan for the IICTR, will introduce measurement and evaluation methodology that is novel in the sense that it is, by design, a mixed methodology and extended (measurement) trial - over numerous domains - with a systematic and thorough tracking of evaluation components at each stage of the process. Because of this, evaluation research studies published in referred journals are designated to be one of the many outcomes.
