2026 OPEG Spring Exchange: Adaptive Evaluation for a Changing Environment

CoHatch Polaris 

Friday, April 24th, 2026 from 9:30am-3:15pm

Agenda

Join colleagues in person from across Ohio for a dynamic day of learning, sharing. Our theme is Adaptive Evaluation for a Changing Environment, focusing on how evaluators can adapt methods in a rapidly changing environment.

9:30am: Registration opens

10:00am: Welcome & Opening Remarks, OPEG Board members

10:15am: A Practical Framework for Policy Analysis, Rob Moore, Scioto Analysis

This session introduces evaluators and applied analysts to Eugene Bardach’s Eightfold Path to Policy Analysis as a practical framework for guiding analysis in uncertain and resource-constrained environments.

This session presents the Eightfold Path as a usable tool for evaluators navigating political turbulence, stakeholder conflict, and incomplete data.

11:00am: Break

11:15am: Blending Tradition and Technology: Using Snowball Sampling, a Net Promoter Score (NPS), and AI to Secure a Mental Health Levy, Oscar McKnight, Ashland University and David C. Ross, Mental Health & Recovery Board of Ashland County

In the high-stakes environment of public funding, evaluators must bridge the gap between raw community sentiment and actionable strategy. This session presents a case study of the 2025 Ashland County Mental Health Levy research, where traditional evaluation methods were hybridized with Human-Assisted Artificial Intelligence (HAAI) to navigate a complex, conservative landscape.

12:00pm: Lunch Break

1:00pm: Do leadership programs create future leaders? Using AI to track leadership outcomes, Rachana Gurudu, Case Western Reserve University and Clara Pelfrey, PhD, Case Western Reserve University

Assessing the long-term outcomes of leadership development programs is challenging. This workshop will review the leadership outcomes of the FLEX Leadership Development Program for Women Faculty in the CWRU SOM from 2012 to 2024 with 187 participants. Whether or not they have become leaders is a critical long-term outcome for the FLEX Program. We hypothesize that we can learn the long-term leadership outcomes of FLEX participants by tracking their outcomes using AI and careful prompt engineering, along with rigorous data checking and validation.

These data suggest that with careful prompt design, AI can significantly supplement survey data to learn the long-term outcomes of program participants.

1:45pm: Break

2:00pm: Using Our Evaluation Skillset to Lift up the Voices we Need to Hear, Amanda Klein-Cox, Engage with Data

In an era where silencing and marginalizing has become more prominent than empowering and uplifting, using data to tell stories is more important than ever. As evaluators, we have numerous tools in our toolbox that empower us to lift up the voices of others, and in the current political climate, it is imperative that we use these skills and methodologies to do so in a compelling way. This interactive workshop will challenge participants to think differently about how they collect, report, and share quantitative and qualitative data in their evaluation work, to benefit communities and populations whose perspectives need to be heard.

3pm: Closing Remarks, OPEG Board Members