Join us on April 28, 2018 from 1:30 – 4:00 pm in Hollywood for our event “Data Visualization 101 for Evaluators”! We have an exciting program that will feature two groups of presenters. They will discuss the use of data visualization techniques, such as GIS, Tableau, and Infogram, in their evaluation work.

Click here to RSVP!

1) Overview of GIS in Evaluation
Stephen C. Maack and Arlene Hopkins
DBA REAP Change Consultants

About the speakers:

Dr. Stephen C. Maack, Owner and Lead Consultant of REAP Change Consultants, has a Ph.D. in Anthropology with a specialty in Social Change.  He became interested in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) around 1978 when he was working as a City Planner at St. Paul (MN) City Planning.  He first had a colleague run a GIS process (geocoding) while liaison for the City of St. Paul to the U.S. Census Bureau during the 1980 census. He has watched the field grow from highly specialized programs run only on mainframe computers to a variety of specialized but accessible application available on multiple platforms, including laptops, with multiple uses.  He finally learned to program in ArcView by ESRI, the major commercially available GIS software, in 2002/2003 when he took GIS courses at Rio Hondo College and has offered computer mapping services through his firm since about 2004. He facilitated a workshop on GIS and Anthropology in 2005 and between 2009 and 2012 he and Arlene Hopkins offered a workshop at AEA Annual conferences titled “Introduction to GIS and Spatial Analysis in Evaluation”.  He, Ms. Hopkins and Aaron Wilson Kates are offering two half-day workshops titled “Computer Mapping (GIS) Applications in Evaluation” at the AEA 2018 Summer Institute in Atlanta on June 19, 2018.

Arlene Hopkins, Principal of Arlene Hopkins and Associates, is an architect, evaluator and educator.  Among her public service roles, she presently serves on the Board of the Santa Monica Public Library.   As a member of the Resilience Thematic Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Graduate Women in Science, American Evaluation Association, American Library Association and the California Native Plant Society, among others, she maintains a trans-disciplinary approach to thinking boldly – and with an empirical basis, about how we need to adapt and innovate our cultural systems to both regenerate ecological systems and the equitable commons.  GIS is an essential tool for this work. She regularly attends ESRI conferences, and she has taken courses in GIS at Santa Monica Community College in Santa Monica, CA. She co-facilitated the AEA Annual conference workshops titled “Introduction to GIS and Spatial Analysis in Evaluation” between 2009 and 2012. She will be co-facilitating the half-day workshops titled “Computer Mapping (GIS) Applications in Evaluation” at the AEA 2018 Summer Institute in Atlanta on June 19, 2018.

About the presentation:

GIS is an underused technology in evaluation, with only two articles about it published in the American Journal of Evaluation.  It has most frequently been used in public health and environmental program evaluation. While many people are now familiar with Google Maps and the use of computer maps for navigating around cities and across the country with the help of the related Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, few understand how GIS can be used in evaluation.

During this brief overview presentation attendees will:

• Hear a brief explanation of how GIS works;
• Learn about several of the selection and analysis features of GIS software that make it a potentially powerful software tool in evaluation;
• Hear how GIS can be used in program and policy evaluation for needs assessment, visualizing spatial relationship of disparate data, combining data from program and secondary sources, showing data correlations, mapping changes over time, tracing networks, displaying evaluation results, statistically testing evaluation results, and combining quantitative and qualitative data;
• Gain a knowledge of specific examples of GIS uses in health, public safety, social services, fiscal/economic, environmental, education and other program and policy evaluations.   

2) Survey Data Visualizations Using Tableau and Infogram
Alma Boutin-Martinez and Hilary Molina
Fielding Graduate University

About the speakers:

Dr. Alma Boutin-Martinez is the Senior Institutional Research Analyst at Fielding Graduate University. In this role, she provides data and analyses to support program evaluation, institutional and program accreditation, learning assessment, and institutional decision-making to advance the university’s mission. She has created dashboards in Tableau that examine strategic enrollment management and alumni survey data. She has also used Tableau to present diversity and inclusion survey data. Before joining Fielding Graduate University, she conducted educational program evaluation research on the multi-campus UC online program. She also worked closely with Mosaic Network, Inc. to investigate how the Grant Evaluation and Management Solution (GEMS) system was used at the Partnership for Children of Cumberland County (PFC), and the degree to which participants perceived that it was improving the efficiency and outcomes for PFC. She earned a Ph.D. in Education from the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, University of California, Santa Barbara. She has published research on parental engagement, literacy, academic intrinsic motivation, and resilience.

Hilary Molina, M.S currently works for Fielding Graduate University as the Director of Alumni Relations. She is responsible for the planning and implementation of university-wide strategic initiatives that engage alumni and provide tangible benefits to graduate and current students. Hilary’s experience in data analysis and evaluation began during her graduate work at California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo. Her thesis research focused on the quantitative analysis of statewide exercise testing protocols and test results for firefighters, which was later used to propose California state standards. PowerPoint was the norm for static data visualization presentations at this time and when she transitioned into account management, she honed her skills in data analysis and professional presentations during her time in title insurance. It was not until Hilary began working in higher education with large-scale data that creating data visualizations became an integral part of her work. Her most recent alumni survey data continues to drive strategic planning for the university. Her office works closely with the institutional research department to develop, administer, and analyze alumni survey data. With the use of programs such as Infogram, Hilary has evolved her alumni survey data presentations into more dynamic and interactive demonstrations based on the audience and platform (e.g., print, PowerPoint, Prezi, website embedded, virtual)

About the presentation:

This presentation will examine data collected from the Fielding Graduate University Alumni Relations Survey. This presentation will include survey results disaggregated by program, alumni demographics, and describe how visualizations were created using Tableau and Infogram.

During this presentation, attendees will:

• Obtain a brief overview of Infogram and Tableau;
• Understand when it is best to use a bar graph, pie chart, and line graph;
• Review the Data Visualization Checklist created by Stephanie Evergreen and Ann Emery;
• Gain knowledge of best practices when creating dashboards; and
• Understand how data visualizations created with Infogram and Tableau were used to inform decision making and evaluation.