PHLT 8044 Week 8 Data Collection Schedule Plan Example

Data Collection Plan for the School Water Access Evaluation: Who Supplies Each Record, When, Under What Agreement, Scheduled Against the School Calendar Before the Collisions Happen

Student Name

Walden University

PHLT 8044: Advanced Program Evaluation

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Data Collection Plan for the School Water Access Evaluation: Who Supplies Each Record, When, Under What Agreement, Scheduled Against the School Calendar Before the Collisions Happen

Purpose

The measurement plan names six primary indicators and their sources. This plan decides who supplies each record, under what agreement, in which month, and what could go wrong in getting it. Data collection in schools collides with fixed calendars: testing weeks, holidays, summer closure and the start-of-year rush when principals have no time for evaluators. A survey scheduled during state testing will not happen; a sales extract requested after a district changes its point-of-sale vendor may never arrive. The plan works those collisions out in advance and assigns a named role to every task, following the evaluation framework's emphasis on feasibility as a standard for sound evaluation (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 1999).

Sources, Suppliers and Agreements

Five suppliers provide the data. District food service directors in the 70 program and waiting-list schools' districts supply cafeteria sales extracts. The program's field staff supply maintenance logs and meter readings. Principals grant access for site visits and in-class surveys. Families receive notice of the student recall survey and may opt their child out. The state health department supplies results from its student health survey.

Two agreements are needed before anything else. The first is a data sharing agreement with each district covering sales records, which contain no student identifiers but are district property. The second covers the student recall survey: it collects no names, but it involves students in class time, so it requires district research approval, notice to families with an opt-out, and review by the evaluator's institutional review board. Because the recall records no names or student numbers, it does not create education records under federal student privacy law (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, 20 U.S.C. § 1232g), but districts may still apply their own review rules.

The Schedule

Table 1

Data Collection Schedule by Month, Evaluation Year

Note. Months reflect a typical school year in the composite state; testing windows will be confirmed with each district by August.

Roles and Training

Three roles carry most of the work. The field coordinator schedules site visits and surveys, administers the recall in classrooms using a fixed script and checks forms for completeness before leaving each school. The data analyst requests and maps sales extracts, maintains the master dataset and logs every data problem with its date and resolution. The lead evaluator approves any change to the schedule or procedures and keeps the record that the analysis plan will rely on. Before the baseline survey, the field coordinator and two assistants will practice the recall script together and administer it in a pilot classroom outside the sample, comparing their recorded answers to make sure they ask follow-up questions the same way. Station distances at site visits will be measured with the same tape and recorded from the same point at each cafeteria entrance.

Data Handling

Sales extracts will arrive in different formats from different districts, since districts use different point-of-sale systems. Each district's beverage item codes will be mapped once, at the start, to a common list of sugary drinks, plain water, milk and flavored milk, and the mapping will be reviewed with food service staff. Any mid-year change in a district's system will be logged, since a change in coding is an instrumentation threat to the comparison. Survey forms will be scanned, entered twice and stored without identifiers. Maintenance logs will be checked monthly against meter activity, so that a station logged as working but showing no use is flagged for a visit.

Respecting the People Who Supply Data

The Program Evaluation Standards include propriety, which concerns the rights and burdens of people involved in an evaluation (Yarbrough et al., 2011). Three choices follow. The recall survey takes under ten minutes and replaces no instructional time scheduled for testing preparation. Families receive notice in the languages spoken in each school, with a simple way to opt out. Principals receive a one-page school report after each site visit, so the data they help collect also serve them.

Contingencies

Three problems are likely enough to plan for. If a district cannot provide sales data on time, the analyst will request the missing months in the next extract and the analysis will note the gap; if a district cannot provide any data, its schools will be dropped from the primary comparison and the loss reported. If a survey school withdraws, a replacement will be drawn from the same group and income stratum before the baseline survey, but not after, since a replacement without baseline data would weaken the comparison. If installation in a program school is delayed past October, that school will be analyzed separately, because it would receive less than a full year of the program.

What This Plan Delivers

By July of the evaluation year, the plan delivers three years of sales data for 70 schools, two rounds of recall data in 24 schools, monthly implementation data, site visit findings and cost records, each collected under a documented agreement and on a schedule built around the school calendar.

References

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (1999). Framework for program evaluation in public health. MMWR Recommendations and Reports, 48(RR-11), 1-40.

Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, 20 U.S.C. § 1232g (2024).

Yarbrough, D. B., Shulha, L. M., Hopson, R. K., & Caruthers, F. A. (2011). The program evaluation standards: A guide for evaluators and evaluation users (3rd ed.). SAGE.