The people involved in the evaluation have to decide where their program fits on the scale. After that decision is made, the evaluation leads into program planning for the next program year or cycle. The people involved decide what they could realistically accomplish in the next program round and what assistance they will require to attain their objectives. The system is flexible enough so that people can choose their own priorities for the coming year. This is important because different programs will have different concerns and different priorities, but the process helps to identify areas of strength and areas requiring improvement. It may also suggest some new ideas or ways of doing things that have not previously been thought of or tried.

It is strongly recommended that this program evaluation be done by a cross-section of program participants in a group process. However, in rural areas, where tutors and learners may be scattered over fairly long distances and in suburban areas, where numbers in the programs are large, it may be difficult to arrange a satisfactory group process. Hence, it was decided to develop two other instruments - a Tutor's Questionnaire and a Learner's Questionnaire. Each of these is keyed to the good practice statements which most directly impinge on the tutor and learner respectively. A correlation between the three instruments is found following the Good Practice Statements.

The Field Test

The instruments were field tested in different programs in British Columbia. The sites included: a northern community college with three programs in different sized communities; an interior rural program site of a community college; a large well-established suburban community college program; an independent community literacy program; and two school board programs. The independent and college programs chosen all use volunteers in one-to-one tutoring situations. One of the school board programs has a mix of activity - a "drop-in" learning centre with tutors, and a one-to-one tutoring component away from the centre. The other school board program operates a large centre with several part-time instructors and has a small corps of volunteers who give individual help to learners working in the centre. Thus, a mix of program sites and program types was chosen. In addition, some experienced literacy workers attended or conducted a group evaluation to get a firsthand impression of how the process worked and of any "problem-spots" with the instruments. After the results were in and analyzed, some modifications were made to the instruments.