Miriam: Tell me a bit about the evaluation procedure that you set up for the program.

Neil:

I’m really excited about the evaluation I did this past run, because the way we’ve done it in the past is had a three-tier type of evaluation process. We’d have the in-class evaluations that Lynn would do. It would kind of be like a report card mid way through – the volunteers who the participants would work with would evaluate the progress of each participant – with reading, writing, critical thinking, their performance, how their self-esteem developed. They would rate these things and provide feedback for them.

Miriam: And the feedback was going to the participants?

Neil:

To the participants. Right. The other two components were us evaluating our program, and its effectiveness, which is what I was more of a part of. The first run, we did a parent evaluation where we would call the parents of each participant and ask them a questionnaire whether they had noticed any growth or any changes with their son or daughter since they started the program. We thought that was a really good opportunity to see what the effectiveness of our program is outside of the classroom.

We didn’t do that this run, because we felt like these kids were a bit older, and they were a lot more forthcoming in sharing with us, and expressing what they thought and felt. Whereas with the other run, they were younger so they would clam up a lot of the time when we tried to probe with them. We chose just to do a focus group this time round. It was cool because from our evaluations last year, I had made the recommendation to have a two-tiered evaluation that will have the discussion questions like we did previously, and ask them and have a discussion group, and basically just record as we go along.

Another thing that we introduced this year is ordinal measures. We’d have a sheet of, “how would you rate your performance in reading and writing?”, or you know, writing rhymes in hip-hop, and performance. They would rate themselves how they felt they’d grew. We did a scale – you know, because it’s usually excellent, good, satisfactory, poor? Instead, we did, ‘brap, brap’; ‘dope’; ‘aiiit”, and ‘wack’! They really responded well to that.

Miriam: Wait, help me. Explain to the audience who doesn’t know hip-hop – wack is bad?

Neil:

Wack is bad! Wack is poor; ‘brap, brap’ is like, something that you say when something is amazing. It’s like, “I just got a job today – brap, brap!” You know what I mean? That sort of stuff. ‘Dope’ is good, and ‘Aiiit’ is all right – poor. That was fun, and the kids were excited about it.

I feel like the discussion portion is where we got a lot of our responses. We would ask questions like, “How would you guys feel about this program if it was one of your day classes; has your perception of hip-hop culture changed since you’ve been with the program?” We would record for each participant what they thought about that question. We got some good responses, and I think they brought forward a few themes that we wanted to develop a bit more.

Miriam: How do they feel about the hip-hop classes at school?

Neil:

That was interesting. A lot of them thought they wanted it to be in their school, but they were also realistic that they felt it was kind of not so plausible for that to be one of their classes. They were like, “They wouldn’t let it!”