Measuring outcomes in order to assess the impact of a program can be a long and complex process.
"Fair tests" have to be done to check whether a program actually produces specific outcomes. This exercise focuses on the conditions that must be met in order to conduct "fair tests" that give us reliable measures of outcomes.
Read this paragraph and answer the question below.
Conditions For Measuring Outcomes
The first condition for conducting "fair tests" of a program is to collect data about participants before and after they take part in the program. This enables researchers to check how the program affected people (the experimental group). These results can then be compared to data on people who did not participate in the program (the control group). A second condition is randomly placing people in the experimental or control groups, where any participant has an equal chance of being included in either group. A third condition is that participants do not know if they are in experimental or control groups.
Even if the conditions described in the above paragraph are met, measuring outcomes accurately can be a very difficult task.
Can you think of some of the difficulties that may prevent reliable measurements of a program's outcomes?
Choose the 3 correct answers.
