Bottom Line: National Fire Academy Call for Evaluation Examples

By Angela D. Mickalide, Ph.D., CHES, Home Safety Council Director of Education and Outreach
July 2008

I am serving on the design/development team of a new National Fire Academy course entitled Demonstrating Your Prevention Program’s Worth. The six-day course will be targeted to a wide range of prevention specialists such as inspectors, public educators, and fire marshals, in order to better evaluate the effectiveness of their prevention programs. The course addresses the process of prevention evaluation, as well as the use of specific tools and techniques to conduct prevention evaluation.

The course addresses four levels of prevention evaluation: formative evaluation, process evaluation, impact evaluation and outcome evaluation:

• Formative evaluation – the process of testing program plans and elements for feasibility, appropriateness, acceptability and applicability.
• Process evaluation – the mechanism of testing whether a program is reaching the target population; in other words, how well the specific goals of a public education or inspection activity have been met.
• Impact evaluation – the mechanism of measuring changes in the target population of the sort the program is intended to produce. In other words, it measures the presence of hazards in the target population.
• Outcome evaluation – the mechanism of determining how well a program achieves its goals of reducing fire (or other hazards).

Share Examples from Your Department

We need your help! Please provide me with examples from your organization of any of the above evaluation activities. These may include copies of any evaluation instruments, statements of goals or objectives for particular programs that you evaluate, and/or summaries of results (reports, graphs, etc.) that show how well you are performing the evaluation.

You will be notified should your samples be used as part of the coursework and we will work with you on exactly how and under what circumstances they will appear, be credited, etc.

Pilot offerings of this great program will be scheduled at the campus of the National Fire Academy in Emmitsburg, Maryland in 2008; and they will be announced on the USFA Web site. Please send your information to me prior to July 31, 2008.

You can call me to discuss if you like, or you can e-mail, fax or send your information to me at:

Angela D. Mickalide, Ph.D., CHES
Director of Education and Outreach
Home Safety Council
1250 Eye Street, NW, Suite 1000
Washington, DC 20005
Phone: 202-330-4907
Fax: 202-330-4901
Email: Angela.mickalide@homesafetycouncil.org

Thanks for your willingness to share, and your support of the National Fire Academy and its programs.