We’ve been pleased to support the Northumberland Cultural Education Partnership through 2023 and 2024 with an evolving portfolio of work to evaluate its delivery work and explore its role and priorities going forward.
One of the most interesting strands of the work was to produce an external evaluation of a very interesting project involving hundreds of young people across a number of schools in the county. Whenever we undertake evaluation work we tend to have two things in mind. Firstly, we want to establish the extent to which the project has fulfilled its objectives and outcomes. Secondly, we hope that the reports we write might also become a resource for learning, made available to a wider network of stakeholders who have an interest in the subject matter, in this case, arts & culture education.
The project being evaluated was really fascinating as it included the use of a unique outcomes framework developed by the innovative arts charity Mortal Fools. Seeking to understand the links between arts participation and wellbeing the model, called ‘PERMA’ invited young people and teachers to reflect regularly on Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Achievement.
An enormous amount of data had been collected over the course of the project and a big part of our task was to analyse and interpret it. Presenting complex data in simple ways is something we consider very important at Goodlabs - it’s a running theme through most of our assignments. In this case we used ‘stock and flow’ charts to demonstrate the correlation between observations, highlighting distribution ranges as well as averages. The advantage of this approach is to be able to quickly see the general trend as well as any outliers.
If you’re having challenges understanding and communicating the story that your data is telling drop us a line, we’d love to help you get to grips with it.
