CIPP Evaluation Model Checklist
This checklist is designed to help evaluators evaluate programs with relatively long-term goals. The checklist’s first main function is to provide timely evaluation reports that assist groups to plan, carry out, institutionalize, and/or disseminate effective services to targeted beneficiaries. The checklist’s other main function is to review and assess a program’s history and to issue a summative evaluation report on its merit, worth, and significance and the lessons learned.
This checklist has 10 components. The first—contractual agreements to guide the evaluation—is followed by the context, input, process, impact, effectiveness, sustainability, and transportability evaluation components. The last 2 are metaevaluation and the final synthesis report. Contracting for the evaluation is done at the evaluation’s outset, then updated as needed. The 7 CIPP components may be employed selectively and in different sequences and often simultaneously depending on the needs of particular evaluations. Especially, evaluators should take into account any sound evaluation information the clients/stakeholders already have or can get from other sources. CIPP evaluations should complement rather than supplant other defensible evaluations of an entity. Metaevaluation (evaluation of an evaluation) is to be done throughout the evaluation process; evaluators also should encourage and cooperate with independent assessments of their work. At the end of the evaluation, evaluators are advised to give their attestation of the extent to which applicable professional standards were met. This checklist’s final component provides concrete advice for compiling the final summative evaluation report, especially by drawing together the formative evaluation reports that were issued throughout the evaluation.
The concept of evaluation underlying the CIPP Model and this checklist is that evaluations should assess and report an entity’s merit, worth, and significance and also present lessons learned. Moreover, CIPP evaluations and applications of this checklist should meet the Joint Committee (1994) standards of utility, feasibility, propriety, and accuracy. The model’s main theme is that evaluation’s most important purpose is not to prove, but to improve.