Hello camp parents! My name is Laurie, and I recently joined ACA as the Director of Research. In this role, I facilitate Research 360, which is ACA’s new strategic focus on research and evaluation. The goals of this initiative are to conduct a 5-Year Impact Study on camp experiences and to help camps start and expand their own evaluation efforts.

Happy New Year, Camp Evaluators! The year 2017 brings a lot of excitement for ACA’s Research 360 efforts, for both local camp evaluation and the 5-Year Impact Study. For local camps (the inside of the Research 360 circle), we will expand our evaluation training resources and initiate a Youth Outcomes Battery User’s Group.

Greetings camp evaluators! If you are anything like me, this post will find you cold, busy, and not at all interested in complex information. ‘Tis the season, it seems.

With that in mind, I offer timely and simple survey tricks you can use right now that will give you useful and easy to manage evaluation data all year long.

Hello Camp Evaluators!

In the last Research 360 post, I offered a quality assessment versus outcomes measurement smackdown in order to demonstrate that one is not better than the other: both are critical to telling a complete story about your programs and campers.

If you've been following this blog you know that the Research 360 goal is to build camp evaluation capacity. Thus far I've described what this means and why it is important, and in the most recent post I suggested that camp evaluation capacity is all about quality because quality camp experiences are more likely to produce positive camp outcomes.  I

Hi everyone!  Thanks for joining us as we dive a little deeper into the Research 360 circle; specifically, the part of the circle we are calling "local camps' evaluation capacity."  As we've described before, this local camp focus is the center of the circle, around which moves ACA's 5-year research study.  With the research team busy getting ready for Summer 2017 data coll

Hello and happy fall from the ACA Research Team!  With the change in seasons comes an exciting time for Research 360 as we launch ACA’s 5-year research project, the outer circle of ACA’s new strategic direction focused on research and evaluation.  In past posts I identified the purpose of this project and the ACA volunteers who will advise the project over the next 5 years.

If you’ve been following these posts you might be familiar with the two facets of Research 360:  ACA’s new full circle approach to research and evaluation. Quick review:  we have the outer circle, which represents the 360 degree process that ACA’s 5-year research project will follow, and the center, the local camp research and evaluation efforts, around which this process moves. 

Hello camp researchers and evaluators! Welcome again to Research 360: ACA’s new full circle approach to research and evaluation. I promised in last week’s post that I would dive deeper into ACA’s 5-year research project, which is one element of Research 360 (local camp evaluation is the other).