Institutional evaluation: from the participatory model to the formative impact

Introduction: Taking as a starting point the Political-Pedagogical Project of a Teaching Unit, at a public university in the South of Brazil, the Institutional Assessment Program was constructed and implemented.
The evaluation cycle (2014/2017) was implemented, with 7.010 participants, encompassing a community made up of Students, Undergraduate teachers; Teachers from postgraduate studies; Affiliated institutions; Graduates; Managers; services private companies; and from Research and Extension. This is a research process based on mixed methodologies, with emphasis on qualitative approaches, that help explore participants’ listening.
Goals and Methods: Based on the need to implement an internal institutional assessment and the theoretical basis, the following research question was identified: which evaluation model can build instruments, identify indicators, and contribute to the increase of an evaluation culture?
The specific objectives were identified: 1) implement, through Participatory Institutional Assessment, an anticipatory, reactive, autonomous, and complementary assessment to regulation; 2) encourage increased community participation in evaluation through the defense of the public good.
This case study focus on an evaluation process that was developed in four stages: preparation, evaluation, results, and meta-evaluation. A set of 10 indicators were identified and build related online instruments.
Results: Mixed methodologies, with emphasis on qualitative approaches allowed us to obtain enriching results, which valued listening to participants, in addition to the analysis of institutional and legal documents.
Conclusions: The initial theoretical framework was extremely valuable for identifying the questions we wanted to answer, for identifying the 10 specific indicators, developing the instruments, implementing the self-assessment, and identifying the stakeholders/participants.
The participatory evaluation methodology allowed involvement of several participants, generating enriched training, acquisition of learning and creating a team with practice evaluation competence. In addition to the results and recommendations, the main impact is the construction of a culture of participatory evaluation, which aims at continuous improvement based on democratic principles.