Cultural Considerations, Competence, and Capacity Building - Essay Example

The evaluation undertaken by our firm came up with the reason behind this observation. Most students from minority schools enroll in low-level colleges because of a lack of finances, these schools do not have the resources needed for them to complete their college studies like their year mates in high-level colleges, which are mostly the Whites and the Asians who come out successfully as graduates. The students from the minority end up dropping out of college, and a few makes it to graduation leading to low graduation rates among these minority groups. Cultural differences have been a contributing factor to the differences in graduation rates between these two groups (Davidson, 2008).

The process of carrying out the evaluation process is technical and requires that an individual be conversant with the cultural issues of the setting he/she is dealing with. The is a need for evaluators to have some cultural competencies in that setting, such cultural competencies include understanding communication patterns used, practices these communities participate in, mode of dressing, and mode of presenting himself/herself. A lack of these competencies will render evaluation useless since they will not open up. Consulting firms should ensure that both the majority and minority groups are represented.

Looking at the composition of both the staff and the students in the school, there was an unequal distribution of staff among the races, minority groups had few staff while the majority groups dominates almost all sectors. If cultural biases are to be minimized and even brought to an end, the authority should ensure that these inequalities are brought to an end. Capacity building in the district schools should be put into consideration during the evaluation process. Consulting firms should create positions to accommodate all groups; the capacity of each group should be put into consideration (Becker, 2003).

Discussion 2: Collecting Information and Evaluation Designs

Effective learning and acquisition of appropriate skills and experience in students are realized when teachers put into consideration the development of quality and thorough evaluation of their students. Students’ experiences and needs should be put into consideration, in the process of evaluation. An evaluation plan is significant to not only teachers and students, but to parents. The K-12 process as an evaluation process has utilized case studies and comparison as study designs.

In the evaluation process, a case study was appropriate in the study since a large group and area were to be covered. The benefit of using a case study is that it combines multiple data sources like interviews, video, and videotapes, and observation, this is beneficial in that errors and misleading information is minimized. Case study, however, has limitations in that some information may be neglected making the evaluation process unsuccessful (Davidson, 2008).

Random sampling is most useful when the phenomena are not distributed in any particular order, in the evaluation process the method was appropriate in the K 12 program since the students were distributed disregarding their background. The method, however, a poorly selected sample can easily lead to misleading information, which results in inappropriate concussion (Gary, 2011). Read More