Synopsis: Join us to learn more about strategies for developing evaluation plans for grant-funded projects, including funder expectations, evaluation plan essentials, balancing research and evaluation, identifying and contracting with external evaluators, and managing your relationship with external evaluators.

Bio: Kirk Vandersall, Managing Director of Arroyo Research Services, evaluates education programs in areas that include STEM, PreK-20 pathways for underrepresented students, professional learning, new teacher mentoring and development, curriculum reform, policy reform, teen pregnancy prevention, and broad partnership projects from funders that include the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Defense Education Activity, state education agencies and foundations. His clients include universities such as California State University Fullerton, CSU Dominguez Hills, University of Virginia, State University of New York, University of Arizona, University of South Florida, University of Vermont, and others, dozens of school systems such as Fairfax County Public Schools (VA), Hillsborough County Public Schools (Tampa, FL), and Socorro Independent School District (TX), state education agencies that include Texas, Florida, Ohio, Oklahoma, New York, Tennessee, Florida, and Kentucky, and organizations that include Learning Forward, Reach Virginia, Project Vida Health Center, Northern Virginia Family Service, and ChickTech.

Vandersall specialized in state and local policy studies at the Howard Samuels State Management and Policy Center in New York City where he led education policy studies throughout the country. Prior to forming Arroyo Research Services, Vandersall was a founding partner and Research and Evaluation Practice Leader of the national education technology consulting firm Metiri Group, established an office of Assessment and Evaluation for a large urban school district in Los Angeles County, taught graduate-level policy analysis and evaluation, and has been a research and evaluation consultant for foundation, nonprofit and corporate projects in education, healthcare and urban policy.