We are approaching the end of the Capstone Nursing Practice course. It is week 6 of the “7.5” week period but weeks 7+7.5 are essentially the same. There is still a week to tie up loose ends, but the end is essentially here. The focus for this week is project evaluation. It is understood that for project planning and implementation, 7.5 weeks moves really fast, and that a better evaluation would likely consider more distant intervals (e.g., how are things in a month? Or after 6 months? Or in a year? etc.). In that respect, in earlier weeks you created some objectives that ideally should be evaluated within this time-frame, and there may be some that demand evaluation ‘later’. For the ‘later’ ones you can still discuss your expectations and clearly identify the methods you would use to measure or objectively evaluate things ‘then’ if you were still around.
In your prior course work you have likely encountered evaluation language that discussed the Summative and Formative evaluation of a program. Understanding that in many texts there is overlap in the definition of these terms, we will try to keep them separate for the assignments this week.
In a simple sense, a Summative evaluation would evaluate the program achievement specific to its’ primary goal. For example, if you ran a quit smoking program a key indicator would be a measure of how many participants quit smoking. For the Formative evaluation, you consider the process elements of your work. Process elements can involve many things, such as; Did the people you worked with complete the planning tasks they committed to? How was communication between all involved people? Other process elements it might evaluate the classroom conditions for a teaching program, such as; How was the room lighting? temperature? noise? etc.
This week again, please complete the journal entry, and submit the final part of the project’s formal paper. Given how weeks overlap and the workload this week, the survey for this week/next is combined and the due date is different – so pay attention to the due date listed and make sure to look ahead.
NOTE evaluation must include that project had 11 participants 7 professionals 4 patients. Lack of participants and lack of time are both limitations to the study
