Below you'll find answers to the questions we get asked most about EART.
To submit a question, please fill out this form.
For more information, contact EAreliability@forumfyi.org.
As part of the Youth Program Quality Intervention (YPQI), many programs choose to engage with a deeper intervention that involves external assessment in addition to program self assessment. In external assessment, a trained reliable external assessor visits sites to observe a single program offering and scores a PQA based on the observation.
In contrast to self assessment, where program staff score the PQA based on their own delivery, external assessors are people outside of the program who go through a reliability training process to make sure they would score an observation the same way that our expert raters would. For networks looking to deepen their intervention, external assessors provide an objective perspective in scoring the PQA which is helpful in identifying areas of improvement.
Attend a live in-person or virtual training! External assessors attend an External Assessor Reliability Training workshop to practice skills and complete a reliability check. All assessors must pass the reliability check to be endorsed as external assessors prior to conducting any site visits. The training is available for the Youth, School-Age, SEL, and Summer Learning PQAs.
If you are interested in attending a live workshop, please fill out the EART interest form to be notified of upcoming opportunities.
Participants who reach reliability receive an endorsement letter via email and are able to collect research quality data and conduct external assessments for two years from the date listed on their endorsement letter. An optional continuing education process is available to complete after endorsement.
Beginning in fall 2020, external assessor endorsements will last two years, with an additional reliability test required only on the third year, and every other year beyond that (vs the annual reliability test that was previously required).
External assessors will be directly notified when they are eligible to complete the self-paced renewal process two years after the date of their last endorsement. Communications will be sent to the email provided when attending the workshop. If you are an external assessor who has changed primary email addresses since attending and wish to maintain your endorsement, please notify us of the change by contacting EAreliability@forumfyi.org.
The network lead can coordinate the external assessment process by helping connect sites and assessors, supporting scheduling, monitoring the quality and quantity of assessments, and managing the overall external assessment experience. The network lead also helps to coordinate and host External Assessor Reliability Training (EART) workshops if they wish to have multiple endorsed external assessors within their network.