Data in the Name
Despite what many people believe, this is not objective
What is data?
A piece of data that is significantly different from the other data
What is an outlier?
The person on the Metro Caring team I should go to with questions about how to design an evaluation project, collect data, analyze results, and present them to our community
Who is Sarah?
The first question you should ask when reviewing data you've received from someone
Where does it come from?
Information that takes the form of numbers, counts, categories, or ordered lists
What is numeric (or quantitative) data?
This number, often just called the "average," is what you get when you add all the values in a dataset and then divide by the total number of values
What is the mean?
Your one-stop-shop for evaluation resources and documents on Teams
What is the Data and Evaluation Team (or the Evaluation Channel)?
The second question you should ask when reviewing data you've received from someone
What can I learn from it?
Information that takes the form of stories, anecdotes, speech, and/or pictures
What is narrative (or qualitative) data?
If you arrange all of the values in a data set in order, this is the value in the center
What is a/the median?
A document that describes Metro Caring's context, community, intended outcomes, and assumptions about how change happens
What is Metro Caring's Theory of Change?
The third question you should ask when reviewing data you've received from someone
What can I do with it?
The ability to read data, work with data, and communicate about data by putting it in proper context
What is data literacy?
A measure of the spread of a distribution
What is a standard deviation? (Variance is also acceptable)
A tool to assess whether an evaluation project is advancing Metro Caring's values
What is the Evaluation core values scorecard?
Comparing results to expectations, looking for patterns or relationships, looking for outliers, and reviewing trends over time are strategies for this
What is learning from data?
The representation of information in the form of a chart, diagram, etc.
What is data visualization?
A mathematical calculation of how likely (or unlikely) it is that a result is due to chance
What is statistical significance?
The committee of advisors that helps Metro Caring define important evaluation policies and provides input on our data & evaluation direction
What is the Data and Evaluation Committee?