The relationships among outcomes, indicators, measures, and targets Nolan Malone, Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning

This guide offers educators, program managers, administrators, and researchers a resource for building capacity for monitoring program outcomes. It provides concise definitions of program monitoring components and a framework for assessing program progress. Examples demonstrate the relationships among program components: outcomes, indicators, measures (including benchmarks and baselines), and targets. Policymakers and practitioners can use the framework to better monitor and evaluate programs and thus to make better data-informed decisions. A crucial step in understanding a program’s effectiveness is to establish an ongoing plan for measuring and evaluating its progress. A program monitoring framework can provide a means to gauge whether a program has been successful. Program monitoring can be understood by its components—outcomes, indicators, measures (including benchmarks and baselines), and targets. This guide defines these components and explains how they relate to one another in program evaluation. It also provides a framework for assessing program progress. By following this program monitoring framework, educators can better monitor and evaluate programs and thus make better data-informed decisions. This guide is one of a four-part series on program planning and monitoring released by Regional Educa-tional Laboratory Pacific.1 Other guides in this series provide information on logic models and their use in program evaluation. Logic models are useful tools to help educators identify what is being done and why. A natural follow-up might be to gauge whether program efforts have been successful. Examining outcomes, key components of logic models, is one way to do that