Evaluability Assessment and Capacity Building of the Petey Greene Program’s College Bridge and Tutoring Programs: Initial Lessons Learned for Becoming Evaluation Ready

• In Event: Supporting Educational Access Among Learners who are Incarcerated: Lessons Learned from Programming, Data Collection, and Assessment

Abstract

Recent changes to Pell Grant eligibility, paired with the importance of equitable access to post-secondary education, creates an urgent need for programs and services that support learners who are incarcerated with earning meaningful college credits and degrees. The Petey Greene Program (PGP), in partnership with colleges and universities nationwide, offers College Bridge and higher education tutoring programs to support college readiness of learners residing in jails and prisons. To expand these efforts, PGP has partnered with RTI International (RTI) to conduct an evaluability assessment of these programs to determine their readiness for a more comprehensive evaluation and to understand how organizational and program practices might be improved to build service capacity, track measurable learner, program, and partner outcomes, and investigate perceived programmatic impacts. In this presentation, we provide an overview of PGP’s College Bridge and tutoring programs and an evaluability assessment (EA) of those programs. It will describe the EA’s design, methods, and initial lessons learned using information collected from 1) comprehensive review of the College Bridge and tutoring programs’ design, history, and operations, 2) interviews held with staff about the recruitment, enrollment, operations, and perceived impacts of these programs, and 3) and capacity building exercises that support evaluability.

Authors

• Samuel Scaggs, RTI International

• Samantha Tosto, RTI International

• Alicia McKay, RTI International

• Lori Ko, RTI International

• Michelle Tolbert, RTI International