proofreading

Knowing the systematic steps to differentiate between evaluation and research in a practical way. I feel that I want to go deeper in the world of evaluation to understand how to implement evaluation into any program and especially right now my country is advocating for educational reform and already established the education and training evaluation commission led by the previous minister of education to re-evaluate the educational system and the education outcome to raise our system achievement in the nearest future.

My interest fits within the educational reform and comparative education and with the knowledge that I get from this class I start to set the path for my focus and what I want for my future, not just as a professor in the university. What I liked was the logic module that we used at the beginning of the semester to set the direction to understand what is program evaluation and to look into the program from different angles. Through this semester, we went through different approaches, and two of them seemed to be a great fit for my future and into my country's educational reform and evaluation. Decision-oriented evaluation approaches as an international approach and I believe that my country education and training evaluation commission are using this approach for changing and making the appropriate decisions. All Participant-Oriented Evaluation Approaches would be appropriate to use in Saudi education reform because of inductive reasoning and the use of sources including the participant in the evaluated program.

Through this semester we summarize and explain the 30 standards and some of these standards that I liked to reflect on human rights, as a member of culture studies program at WSU I care about the human needs and what they need the community to cover, and as an international student I believe that I need to care much about the people who are needed me as an evaluator and I need to know what is their culture and what is their rules and rights in their natural setting and not just applying my culture standards into theirs. Understanding the nature of culture and humanity and human rights is part of my study but evaluators need to make sure that they don’t break the culture and the rights of others and presenting them in an ethical way without biases or pre-judgments. As an evaluator, bring the attention to the stakeholders is one of the main points that I would like to look through and understand the bases to deal with different type of stakeholders. The stakeholders play a vital role in every single decision especially in the field of education. Being a good evaluator means to find a way to communicate with and care about the identified stakeholders and the potential other holders such as the community members. Also with the transparency and disclosure to the participant and stakeholders and the evaluators need to make sure to deliver their information and process within the laws and regulation of the evaluation process, without putting the participants in danger of being part of the evaluation process.

Developing an evaluation agreement and evaluation plan adds more practical knowledge to my basic information from this class. Developing the agreement helped me to follow the standards that we had to discuss and made sure that each part of that agreement gets their desire needs from that evaluation. Also, through the plan progress, our group shared different understandings and different perspectives which help us to gather the information and talk as a group from different lenses which helps to apply these standards and drive the plan into the final shape. Working with different backgrounds and the different programs wasn’t in my comfort zone but that helped me to understand how to work with diverse members and learn a lot from this experience.

Lastly, it was a great chance to me to look my Arabic sources and try to translate information to make sure that I fully understanding of materials and improve my skills in analyzing the data with different approach such as linguistic, critical discourse analysis.

I really enrich my knowledge about evaluation process, and I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you very much for Dr. Marcus for his effort and enlighten my way to be such a good evaluator in the future.

Never forget what he said the competency coming from the experience and not from the degree that you have.

Before having this class, I was thinking about my country and the changing that is happening right now into our rules and regulation, also into our educational system and the need for an educational reform. From that point of view, I sign up for this class. My knowledge has changed since the first class, understanding the concept of how to till the difference between evaluation and researching. Understanding how to examine an actual material to evaluate a remaining program not just on paper. For the perspective of a researcher; program evaluation at the beginning represents a similar approach to what do we mean by research. Evaluation and research meant to me that both of them are looking for answers and looking for a better understanding of a problem and seeking better solution.

Within the logic module, I start developing a great understanding of how to look into a problem and how to brainstorming to find and figure out what is the problem, what is the current status and how to solve it in different directions. To understand how program evaluation works and but some effort to develop and create an evaluation plan and read through the program that we use with our evaluation plan and understand and analyze the provided materials and look through them to find information that can help the evaluation process.

Through this semester I founded myself thinking about what I will do next after finishing my degree, maybe because I'm in the middle of deciding in which direction I will shift my attention for my future research I start to think about what my country needs to look through and change. This led me to think about Decision-oriented evaluation approaches and the effect of this approach in my future career. I believe this approach is a great fit to what our educational system needs to fit and be evaluated with because the approach was designed to address the problems that evaluations faced and to look more for solutions for these problems through monitoring of the progress of the desired program and making decisions based of their observations. It would be interesting to create a program and then evaluate it from different members of the class. Program evaluation goes cross various disciplines and fields, and it makes me think about how to use the things that we learned through the semester and how these things can fit into different aspects to apply program evaluation and the use of research methods with the program evaluation process.

As a researcher interested in family and young children I understand what the parents need for their kids and how they want someone to listen to them and from that point I see myself going with the conflict of interest as a solid point even with my future career and what I need to focus on while researching, and maybe evaluating what I need to listen to all the participant in my project or program, and finding a connection between these needs and the solutions that we are hoping for. It’s not an easy thing to follow, but it is also part of their right to have their voices heard by the Customs and the system. As a part of different culture I believe that every evaluator needs to recognize, and balance​ the ​cultural​ and ​political​ ​interests​ and needs of individuals and groups within the evaluation process. Understanding these points may reduce the biases and the conflict that may happen because of different background believes and values.

With my personality as a researcher in the area of ​​early childhood. I like to learn by doing; I find it more helpful and stay more in the student memory and that what I feel about the agreement and the evaluation plan. The more that I read and write about our group program the more that I found myself more involved in the program. This group work came from different members with different efforts to develop that evaluation and benefit from each one of us and their ideas to develop that agreement and plan. Also, reading the instructor materials helped us to have a better understanding of what is the evaluation in real life and how our plan might be if we use it in the real setting. Lastly, I would love to be in the following part of that class to learn more about evaluation and maybe later get the certificate, even its not a required thing to have, but I found myself wanting to go through the world of evaluation and not just some basic information from the introduction class only.