Evaluating the Impact of Your Group

As well as planning how you will run your group and the kind of activities it will cover, you need to put in place a monitoring system so that you can fully evaluate how the group is going and collect evidence of any learning outcomes for the children.

It is particularly useful to keep records of what you do each session, and notes of how the children are responding. Collected together these will give you a 'story' of how the group is progressing. Here is a Reading Group Session Record Sheet (Word, 41kb) you can download and use. 

Also useful is a questionnaire for children joining the group to see how they feel about reading and books.

When they have been with the group for about a year you can then ask follow-up questions to see if there are any differences in their reading and reading habits. You can download and use this Reading Group Pre-Questionnaire (Word, 56kb) and Reading Group Post-Questionnaire (Word, 56kb). 

For a picture of the differences a reading group can make, see this summary of the Chatterbooks 2006 Evaluation (pdf, 2.5mb)which describes the impact this initiative is making, with feedback and pictures from several of the groups.

Young people may be resistant to questionnaires. Sometimes it can be useful to evaluate the impact of the group in more creative, informal ways, for example

• Ask young people to move to a certain area of the room in accordance with whether they enjoyed an activity or not
• Ask young people to position post-its on a flip chart with comments about things that they have enjoyed, not enjoyed and things that they’d like more of
• Make informal discussions about how reading habits have changed part of the regular group meetings
• Ask the young people to interview each other about their reading habits and feed this back to the group 

Good luck, and let colleagues know how you get on through our online discussion area!