Date and time: Thursday 28 May 4.00pm -5.30pm AEST
Topic: NSW Interactive Session: More than vibes: A practical guide to evaluative synthesis
Location: online via zoom, details will be shared just prior to the event
Presenter(s): Sofia Ahmed, Joelle Breault-Hood and Daniel Vogels | NSW Department of Education
Register online by: 27 May 2026

Event description: 

We’ve all been there: you’ve got a heap of findings – some of them pointing one way and some of them another. You’ve got qual and quant data, some tangentially relevant and some critically important.

In this session, Sofia Ahmed, Joelle Breault-Hood and Daniel Vogels will share their experience of how to get to a believable conclusion for your evaluation, even when the evidence is mixed or contradictory. They’ll suggest an approach for moving from mixed findings to an overall conclusion that can’t be framed by audiences as just vibes.

The session will step you through using rubrics to develop a “qualitative weight and sum” synthesis process that supports evaluative reasoning and is also stakeholder-friendly. The presenters will share how they have adapted published weight-and-sum methods, using a central bar of sufficiency to structure judgements, and show how different findings pull an overall conclusion in a more positive or negative direction. You’ll have a chance to see the approach in action as the presenters show you an example from their own work, where they’re using this approach to judge the quality of the support they’re providing to their own stakeholders.

The session is going to be rigorous, lively, practical and interactive, and it’s aiming to get you thinking about how you make judgements at different points in the synthesis process. Come along to hear about a practical solution to a perennial problem, and discuss how this kind of approach could be used in planning, conducting and reporting evaluations – for all evaluators who want their synthesis to rest on more than vibes.

Presenter details:

Sofia Ahmed is an evaluator with more than 18 years’ experience in public policy and research, with a strong focus on educational equity. She holds a PhD in education economics and has taught applied spatial econometrics at postgraduate level.

Joelle Breault-Hood is a senior developmental evaluation officer and qualitative analysis specialist who began her career in outdoor education and earned a PhD in outdoor physical activity and women’s body image. She specialises in building evaluation capacity and helping ensure findings are practical and useful for stakeholders.

Daniel Vogels is a senior developmental evaluation officer with a background in primary teaching. He holds a Graduate Certificate in Data Science and a Master of Evaluation, and is interested in translating evaluation theory into practical tools and methods.

This seminar will be recorded and available on the member portal for AES members only.

This free event has been organised by the NSW Regional Network of the AES. Our seminar series provides an opportunity for you to meet with AES members and others in the evaluation community and to share and learn from the experiences of fellow evaluators. Please ensure you have access to your email address to receive the zoom details. Please also check your email address is correct on your registration form before submitting. 

Session start times:

VIC, NSW, ACT, QLD, TAS: 4.00pm

NT, SA: 3.30pm

WA: 2.00pm

NZ: 6.00pm

For other time zones please go to https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html