Physical Activity
Evaluation of Group Education
You can visit Evaluation on the navigation bar below for general information on evaluation. This section is designed to add to this general information by giving you special considerations for evaluating group education sessions. |
Work with members of the community of interest to develop the group education sessions through participatory approaches or focus groups. This can assist in ensuring that the sessions are conveying what is intended to be conveyed or including appropriate activities. To assess the success of your group education sessions, you might take attendance, measure what participants have learned and their satisfaction with the materials (e.g., changes in knowledge or attitudes), and document how many people participated in the activities and whether participants have increased or maintained their levels of physical activity. In addition, you could evaluate the extent to which information was remembered over time. Participant surveys could be used to measure these factors and to assess more specific changes knowledge, attitudes or physical activity behavior.
There are several challenges in evaluating group education sessions that should be considered:
- It can be difficult to establish causality (e.g., session five on skill building caused 25 participants to increase their physical activity). Some individuals might have increased their physical activity on their own and others may have been influenced by family, friends or the summer season. Therefore, it is important to get as much information as possible about the reason for the increase in physical activity.
- Different instructors or facilitators may motivate or support participants in different ways, thereby influencing the effectiveness of the intervention protocol even if it is implemented the same way in different environments.
- Different community environments have different facilities and equipment that may make physical activity more or less appealing to the participants (e.g., new versus old, competitive and non-competitive alternatives).
- When group education sessions are provided along with other strategies (the most effective way to create change), it is difficult to figure out which intervention strategies led to the changes that were observed in the evaluation.
The following questions have been provided to help guide the discussion you have with your partners about sharing your work with others:
- What is the goal of sharing our work? What action do we want others to take?
- Which group needs to take action right now? Which group is the primary audience at this moment?
- What does this audience care about? What values do we share with this audience?
- What is our message to this audience? What do they need to hear to take action?
- What media outlets does our audience follow? Which newspapers do they read? Which radio stations do they listen to? Which TV newscasts do they watch?
- Who are our opponents?
- What is their message to our audience?