Evaluation Instrument Toolkit Homepage
Welcome to the Oregon Mentors Evaluation Instrument Toolkit, a collection of downloadable evaluation instruments, surveys, scales, and questionnaires designed to provide youth mentoring programs throughout the state with increased access to reliable evaluation tools. This toolkit was created in collaboration with the National Mentoring Center at Education Northwest. We hope the Instrument Toolkit helps your program to better capture the outcomes of the valuable youth mentoring work you do.
All of the resources listed in the Instrument Toolkit are free to access, with many being completely in the public domain and free to use as mentoring programs see fit. We have hand-picked over 60 individual instruments, focusing on those that we thought would be most useful to youth mentoring programs. If you don't find the type of instrument you are looking for within this collection, please see our links to other online repositories of evaluation instruments.
About the Instrument Toolkit:
The Instrument Toolkit is divided into three sections:
- Tips for Using the Instrument Toolkit — This section provides advice on program evaluation and choosing the right instruments to fit your evaluation or assessment needs.
- Browse for Specific Instruments — Browse by keyword terms to find just the right instrument for your program, or see the comprehensive listing by title.
- Other Online Instrument Collections — The instruments gathered here are by no means exhaustive—many more can be found elsewhere online. This section highlights other evaluation tool collections, most of which provide free or low-cost access to tools.
What's in the Toolkit?
The instruments gathered here come from several sources, including mentoring research projects, technical assistance providers, and collections of evaluation tools approved by public agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
For each item in the Instrument Toolkit we have provided:
- A direct link to download the instrument.
- Information about any copyright protection, restrictions on use, or preferred citations.
- A description of the instrument and tips on how mentoring programs might find it useful.
- The applicable age range for the instrument, including populations it was used on in previous research efforts.
- Details on how to administer and score the instrument. Most items are simple pencil and paper surveys, and scoring is usually easy.
In addition to this information, reliability and validity details are usually available for each instrument from the download source.
These tools have all been tested and used in previous research on a variety of youth development, prevention, and educational programs. By using these instruments, mentoring programs can not only improve the quality of their evaluations, but also, in many instances, compare their mentoring outcomes to those of previously researched programs. Funders and program partners will also be assured knowing that your program is using rigorous instruments in measuring the important work you do.
Be sure to see the Tips for Using the Instrument Toolkit section if you are new to evaluation or need more guidance in selecting just the right tool.
If you have an evaluation instrument that you would like to recommend adding to the Instrument Toolkit, please contact us
