ECNA Tool

This is the Evaluation Capacity Needs Assessment tool, that was built by members of the ECN.

Develop Your Evaluation Capacity

We provide the 28-item  ECNA Tool, which can be accessed through our webpage. This comes with proposed scoring and interpretation instructions to support the practical use of this tool.
There are mounting expectations to demonstrate program effectiveness and impacts relative to the intended developmental outcomes for children in the early years. For this reason, it is critical for the early childhood field to have valid frameworks and tools to help them identify and understand their most pressing EC needs. As early childhood organizations and initiatives engage in evaluations more regularly, internally and externally, our EC tool can help to assess the state of their internal EC, to support and carry out critical evaluations. This will help early childhood stakeholders identify specific areas where resources could be diverted to most effectively support EC building activities in their organizations.
Access
In 2014 the Evaluation Capacity Network (the Network) was established to provide a coordinated response to the early childhood field’s evaluation support needs and to enhance access to quality evaluation knowledge, resources and expertise, in addition to capacity-building opportunities tailored to the needs of the field . As part of this response, the Network responded to the need for a psychometrically and contextually relevant tool for understanding individual and organizational evaluation capacity (EC) in the early childhood field. The ECN used a community-engaged approach to develop and validate the ECNA tool so that it is psychometrically valid and contextually relevant for use in early childhood organizations