Evaluation in Dialogue

Since the beginning of the year, the “Zukunfts­werkstätten” of the PrEval Project have invited discussion

PrEval Projekt (Foto: Ricardo Gomez Angel via Unsplash / Unsplash License).

Improving evaluation and quality assurance through dialogue – this is the focus of the PrEval project’s future-oriented workshops and formats (so-called “Zukunfts­werkstätten”). As sub­projects or individual event formats, they accompany the project work from beginning to end and invite all interested parties to parti­cipate and actively shape it. The goal is to jointly identify needs and use them to develop support services and evaluation ap­proaches and instru­ments that can provide sustainable support for actors involved in pre­venting extremism, promoting democracy and working in civic education.

The “Zukunfts­werkstätten” are the eponym and core of the three-year joint project “PrEval – Zukunfts­werkstätten”, which started in October 2022. Together with a steadily growing network of partners from research and practice, the researchers have been surveying the status quo and desiderata since the beginning of the year and develo­ping approaches to solutions in order to strengthen exchange and structures in the field. The dialog between the different actors is the focus of the project.

The subprojects and events of the project are open and address a broad target group. Actors from pro­fessional practice, civil society, research and politics are always invited to contribute their needs and experiences around the topic and to actively shape the solutions. All results will be published as open access publications – during the project and in 2024 as part of a “PrEval Monitor”.

Three of the total of six work packages even bear the term “Zukunftswerkstätten” in their title: They have set them­selves the goal of developing concrete formats and structures – i.e., a publicly accessible database on evaluation reports, a model for a helpdesk, and concrete design options for know­ledge networks in the field of eva­luation and quality assurance. In addition to the further develop­ment of the PrEval Platform, the first work package is also dedicated to the future-oriented monito­ring of existing evaluation capacities in other country contexts as well as a survey on the state of evaluation research. Here, individual exchange formats accompany the project work in order to include as many per­spectives and expertises as possible. Further­more, four pilot studies are developing evaluation designs in the field of (digital) civic education, in security-relevant cooperation contexts, and on client-centered evaluation.

Information on the individual “Zukunfts­werkstätten”, on the opportu­nities to participate, and on the PrEval partners can be found on the project website which will soon be available in English as well.

 

The PrEval Project

PrEval is a research and transfer project that identifies evaluation needs in extremism prevention, democracy promotion and civic education and, based on this, further develops formats and structures to strengthen evaluation and quality assurance in the field. PRIF coordinates the research network.
PrEval is funded by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community (BMI) for a period from October 2022 to September 2025.