A Framework for Evaluation Technical Assistance (Journal Article)

The primary goal of the evaluation technical assistance (TA) was to help the grantees and their evaluators produce rigorous evidence of program effectiveness that would meet the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) evidence review standards, described in Cole et al. To achieve this goal, the evaluation TA team created a framework for TA that included an initial design review, ongoing monitoring and group TA, and a series of evaluation deliverables designed to serve as stepping stones toward the final evaluation report.

This editorial is the second in a series of related opinion pieces. As noted above, the first editorial described the context of the evaluation TA contract, and outlined the HHS evidence standards that were used as an operational goal for a high-quality evaluation. This second editorial describes the TA framework.The final editorial provides a summary of the challenges and lessons learned from the evaluation TA project, and offers insight into the ways that evaluation TA has been improved for future grantee funded evaluations.