A New Approach to Evaluation: A Guide to Improving Your Program

Abstract

This publication is designed to provide practitioners and researchers with a new approach to evaluating their programs. With the new initiatives that are occurring in policing and crime prevention, it is critical to understand the effectiveness of these programs outside of how good they look on paper. Besides the usefulness of the program evaluation, most funding agencies mandate the evaluation as a requirement for funding. This publication identifies a new program evaluation, the organizational development and learning (ODL) model, which introduces a flexible process compared to a traditional evaluation. Each section of the publication provides reasoning for the ODL model and explains the process to ensure replication.