Intro
Self-evaluation is a process of review and action applied to a chosen area of activity. It aims to establish the strengths of the activity, and to identify any actions that will bring about improvement.
Steps
The following steps are designed to assist you in setting up and carrying out a self-evaluation exercise. It is not prescriptive, but should aid you in putting in place a robust process, capable of measuring impact and highlighting areas for improvement.
In Context
This part of the toolkit explains how self-evaluation can be used in a variety of contexts.
HGILDIOC Framework
'How Good is the Learning and Development in Our Community', or 'HGILDIOC', is designed to support evaluation of the quality of services delivered through Community Learning and Development (CLD) type approaches, in Scotland.

Step 3: Develop a set of questions to ask

Discuss what questions to ask in a self-evaluation, and how to ask them: once you know which QIs you will be looking at, and in what context, take a look at the questions that have been framed for each indicator (see either HGILDIOC or Resource 2, which explores the most frequently-used QIs in depth).
You may decide to ‘translate’ these questions so that they are simpler, or more specific, or are combined, depending on your participants and your chosen method of self-evaluation. Some suggested ‘translations’, developed by CLD staff, are provided in Resource 2 based on the Challenge questions they relate to. Feel free to adapt and add to these, but….
…the framing of the questions is crucial to the meaningfulness of the self-evaluation – for example, ensure that they are ‘open’ questions that will engender as full a response as possible. Ensure also that they can lead to an evaluation of the provision (e.g. ‘How good is …? How effective are we at …? How would you rate …? etc.).
In addition, if care is taken over the way that the questions are framed for self-evaluation participants to consider, one question can cover a number of QIs and/or areas of work.
As long as some way is found of asking meaningful questions that relate to your chosen indicators, and as long as a way is found of assessing your current work and identifying any improvements that could be made, then the self-evaluation will, of course, be perfectly valid.

Examples of pre-determined questions about the activity:

‘Have we achieved what we set out to do?’ ‘What went well?’ ‘What are the strengths?’ or ‘Where are we now?’
‘What could be better?’ or ‘Where do we want to go next?’
‘What actions would achieve improvement?’ or ‘How do we get there?’
‘How will we monitor improvement?’ or ‘How will we know?’

Then move on to Step 4…

CLD Self Evaluation Toolkit