AI Use in Evaluation: Sharing Practices and Insights

Join MNEA on August 12 at 12pm as we bring together three evaluators to share their top uses/practices and lightly demonstrate how they leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) in various aspects of their evaluation work.

This workshop specifically addresses the following AEA Evaluator Competencies:

• Competency 4.10: Uses technology appropriately to support and manage the evaluation.
• Competency 1.7: Pursues ongoing professional development to deepen reflective practice, stay current, and build connections.

MNEA is committed to making our events accessible to everyone. Please register by August 5 if you would like an accommodation, and include your request in the registration form.

**********

Presenters

Kayla Meyers, MDP, Founder and Principal Consultant

Kayla is a seasoned program evaluator with over a decade of experience working with mission-driven organizations, and instructs the Program Evaluation and Survey Design courses at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Kayla Meyers Consulting, LLC combines insightful analysis with compelling storytelling to help organizations share their impact through program evaluation and strategic planning.

Kayla will showcase how she uses AI for initial brainstorming and drafting throughout the lifecycle of a program evaluation. Through conversational prompts, AI supports initial brainstorming in the design and analysis planning phases of a project, can make suggestions for initial drafts of data collection tools and reports, and supports content creation for more straightforward sections of reports and proposals.

-----------

Mark Rose Lewis, PhD, Founder Learn R&D | Co-founder ACT Research

Mark is Founder of Learn R&D and Co-founder of ACT Research. He has worked on research and evaluation funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Institute of Education Sciences and has developed evaluation frameworks, systems, and tools for public institutions, philanthropic foundations, and nonprofits. He has also created technology-assisted insight systems to help K-20 educational institutions design, test, and scale policies to start reducing equity gaps.

Mark will share and provide example prompts/workflows related to how he is using AI to automate some basic tasks like transcription and text extraction and speed up human-first qualitative analysis and synthesis. He will also share some of the ethical, professional, and technical issues raised by AI in evaluation and how they are currently influencing our tool choices and practices.

-----------

Tarnjeet Kang, PhD, Director of Equity Assessment, Office of Equity and Inclusion, Minnesota State

Tarnjeet is the Director of Equity Assessment at the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system office, where she supports equity-related evaluation and research at the system and campus levels. Prior to moving to Minnesota, she worked as a multi-sectoral researcher in South Sudan, where she supported non-governmental organizations, United Nations agencies and governmental institutions with evidence-based decision-making and practice. Her work is guided by core values including local responsiveness, decolonization, community-centeredness, as well as gender and conflict sensitivity in research and evaluation.

Tarnjeet’s presentation will focus on equity consideration in AI for higher education institutions and systems (for students and employees). This will include lessons learned from developing system level guidance, and equity and bias considerations that are involved in planning for research and evaluation processes in these types of settings.