The three levels of evaluation commonly used in health education program planning are the elicitation, comparison and validation. In this method, there is a need for continuous surveillance to evaluate the status of the education. It is very important for the instructors to know what is happening on the basis of the periodic evaluation so that any necessary changes can be made. This method has been very effective in the program implementation.
Usually, a group of instructors are assigned the responsibility of carrying out the evaluation.
Invitation to the conferences means that the participant is already involved in the process of the program. The other two levels are needed to evaluate the system itself. One can evaluate the needs of the participants based on the information received. Most of the times, there will be some problems that need to be addressed. If not, the entire evaluation will have been useless.
The next level is done through the intervention.
The aim of this method is to study the effectiveness of the health project. Validation involves the verification of the data gathered from the various levels. Interventions should be done with special care to provide guidance and assistance to the participants. Most of the time, it will be the teachers themselves who will implement the interventions in the classroom.
One of the most commonly used techniques in evaluation is the comparative study.
This involves comparing the strengths and weaknesses of different programs or health education policies. Another one is the contrast study which compares the expected versus the actual outcome. Both these types of studies are normally done between groups or between individuals. Comparative studies are widely used because they are quite reliable and also because they have been used in the past and are still used in the health education system today.
The developmental or conceptual level is the next one that is most often used in evaluations.
This refers to the development of different levels of projects or education. These are usually based on the results of the previous levels and so students must go through the same process again. For a better result, more than one group has to undergo the same process.
The last and the most important level is the research method.
This can be defined as the collection and analysis of data in order to support the teaching or the lesson being taught. Evaluation in health education includes the use of several different types of methods. These include the qualitative techniques, which are mainly used for elicitation and comparative purposes, the quantitative techniques, which are based on statistics, and the meta-analyses, which are a more complex procedure but are based on several different types of statistical methods. Different techniques used in evaluating the different levels of evaluation include the use of point of use sampling, the descriptive analysis, the structured interview, the survey, the experimental techniques, the meta-analyses, and the experimental design.