Determine the indicator's value by using the following methodology:
1) Define who is considered as ‘staff’ for the purpose of this indicator. This should be all those expected to mainstream social inclusion. In the case of specific projects, it should also include the staff of partner organizations, relevant volunteers, consultants, and contractors.
2) Define a limited number of the most important knowledge related to the key principles and practices of mainstreaming social inclusion that the staff should have.
3) Prepare a simple test to assess whether the staff have the defined, most important knowledge. The test can use a combination of the following:
- questions assessing people’s knowledge related to essential measures for mainstreaming social inclusion
- scenarios where the person is asked to describe how s/he would respond to a given situation (i.e. there are no predefined answers)
- questions asking people to choose between two or more statements (one being correct, one or more being incorrect)
- questions assessing the extent to which people believe common misconceptions related to social inclusion (both in general as well as related to mainstreaming)
Ensure that you include enough open-ended questions, as, compared to questions with single / multiple choice answers, these will allow you to understand people’s knowledge better. If you do not specialize in mainstreaming social inclusion, engage a relevant expert in preparing and evaluating the test.
To avoid having unrealistically high or unnecessarily low requirements, verify the difficulty of the test by pre-testing it with several people.
4) Decide how many marks will be allocated to each correct answer. For example, for a correct answer to a simple question, you can give one mark, while for correct answers to more complex questions / scenarios, you can give two marks.
5) Decide how many marks a person needs to get to be considered as “understanding the key principles and practices of mainstreaming social inclusion” (e.g. a score of at least 15 out of 20).
6) Administer the test. If you need to compare a member of staff’s understanding before and after a specific learning event (e.g. a training), you might need to design two comparable tests to administer a pre- and post-test.
7) Count the number of staff who achieved the minimum acceptable score (see point 5).
8) To calculate the indicator’s value, divide the number of staff who achieved the minimum acceptable score by the total number of staff who completed the test. Multiply the result by 100 to convert it to a percentage.