By Dr. Haiyan Hua
With funding from the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the United States Department of State, LASPAU consultant Haiyan Hua, an educational policy researcher and faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is finalizing the development of an evaluation model designed to measure the outcomes of the Fulbright Faculty Development Program in order to understand in a systematic way how grantees benefit from their participation in the program.
 he primary goal of the Fulbright Program, as articulated by Congress, is to “increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.” Though this broad mandate has remained unchanged throughout the six decades of the Program’s existence, the implications of “mutual understanding” on social and economic development, research and scholarship, international collaboration, and institutional development need to be consistently and concretely understood, especially within the context of globalization. The intent of Fulbright exchanges is now extending beyond fostering cross-cultural understanding. Increasingly, the focus is on enhancing the effectiveness of the work that scholars from abroad accomplish as they become part of a global academic and professional community as well as part of the driving force of their own country’s social and economic development.
In addition to the overarching mission of the Fulbright Program to increase mutual understanding, the specific focus of the Faculty Development Program administered by LASPAU is the development and strengthening of institutions of higher education in Latin America and the Caribbean through the graduate training of their faculty at U.S. universities. The Faculty Development Program has now been in place for over thirty years. Previous studies by LASPAU have assessed the accomplishments of selected alumni, but there has not been a mechanism to evaluate the results of the program on an ongoing basis.
What are the effects of the Fulbright Faculty Development Program? How can the outcomes of the program be measured? Is there any quantifiable and consistent way to monitor and evaluate these effects over time? What are the levels of each participant’s knowledge and understanding, attitude and opinion, or practice and behavior before and after participating in the program? What might be the key elements in the program that contribute to these outcomes? Is there any quantifiable way to measure cost-effectiveness? These are critical questions and have provided us with the essential framework for an evaluation.
This evaluation design should enable us to answer questions such as these in a systematic and consistent fashion. It should also strengthen the program’s ability to improve ongoing alumni activities and professional development. It is fully anticipated that the feedback from this study will provide valuable strategic insights for future policy decisions. Although the evaluation will target the Fulbright Faculty Development Program, it will have important implications for evaluations of other exchange programs.
The evaluation model, once implemented, should provide us with multiyear data and multiple core composite measures of the achievement of program objectives within the same program participant group. It will also enable us to trace the growth and development of each participant with respect to his or her knowledge of, attitude toward, and practice of the original goals and objectives of the program. As years go by, new participant groups will be continuously added to the database, allowing cross-cohort or between-cohort analysis. This is the most valid way to measure change.
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