BACKGROUND Asthma is a leading chronic childhood disease in the United States and a major contributor to school absenteeism. Evidence suggests that multicomponent, school-based asthma interventions are a strategic way to address asthma among school-aged children. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) encourages the thirty-six health departments (34 states, DC, and Puerto Rico) in the National Asthma Control Program (NACP) to implement multicomponent, school-based asthma interventions on a larger scale. METHODS To better understand best practices and replicability of state-coordinated interventions in schools, an NACP evaluation team conducted an evaluability assessment of promising interventions run by state asthma programs in Louisiana, Indiana, and Utah. RESULTS The team found that state asthma programs play a critical role in implementing school-based asthma interventions due to their ability to 1) use statewide surveillance data to identify asthma trends and address disparities; 2) facilitate connections between schools, school systems, and school-related community stakeholders; 3) form state-level connections; 4) translate policies to action; 5) provide resources and public health practice information to schools and school systems; 6) monitor and evaluate implementation. CONCLUSIONS This article provides an overview of the evaluability assessment findings and illustrates these roles using examples from the three participating states.

Program evaluation is an important tool for all health professionals as it enables us to learn what works, what does not, and how we can make improvements. In this article, we describe how both program staff and evaluators can use the program evaluation standards to ensure their work is culturally competent and stakeholder driven. When public health programs and their evaluations are responsive to culture and context, and they include meaningful—not token—stakeholder engagement, we produce better evaluations that are more likely to yield useful findings and lead to more effective programs. Effective programs are culturally competent programs that benefit communities in meaningful, respectful ways.

Although evaluative thinking lies at the heart of what we do as evaluators and what we hope to promote in others through our efforts to build evaluation capacity, researchers have given limited attention to measuring this concept. We undertook a research study to better understand how instances of evaluative thinking may present in practice-based settings—specifically within four state asthma control programs funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Asthma Control Program. Through content analyses of documents as well as interviews and a subsequent focus group with four state asthma control programs’ evaluators and program managers we identified and defined twenty-two indicators of evaluative thinking. Findings provide insights about what practitioners may wish to look for when they intend to build evaluative thinking and the types of data sources that may be more or less helpful in such efforts.