Start With the Data You Need

Collecting and understanding data are essential aspects of evaluation, regardless of the stage of your grant cycle (e.g., first, second, or third year). Your evaluation plan, questions, and logic model provide a blueprint for the types of data that need to be collected and from whom. Not all evaluation data comes from a new survey or complicated data collection effort. Depending on your evaluation questions, useful information may already exist within your project or institution.

Where Can Your Data Come From?

  • Faculty and staff
  • Industry partners
  • Students and alumni
  • K-12 schools
  • Community, state, or national datasets
  • Local non-profits

Working with Institutional Research Offices

If you’re looking to use data on student enrollment, persistence, or graduation, one of the most important relationships to begin building early is with your institutional research office. They can often provide student and program data that is relevant to your project and its evaluation. This guide on requesting data from institutional research offices provides an overview of information to ask, including whom to ask if you do not have an institutional research office.

Explore Guide on Requesting Data from IR Offices

Types of evaluation data

Your evaluation questions should guide the type of data you collect. There are different types of data that can be collected from these sources.

Quantitative data

provides information that can be counted or measured, such as survey ratings, participation numbers, or student outcomes.

Qualitative data

collects information using open-ended questions or conversations and provides more detailed information about people’s experiences, perspectives, and ideas. We typically think of quantitative data as numbers and qualitative data as stories.

Data collection can involve both qualitative and quantitative questions, even for the same event or instrument, like a survey.

Data may be collected through methods such as:

Surveys

Site visits

Observations

Interviews

Focus groups

Secondary data

You may work closely with your evaluator to not only identify what data to collect to answer your evaluation questions, but also to build data collection instruments, as this blog discusses the benefits of doing so.  This could look like co-creating a survey to capture complex constructs, like students’ attitudes or beliefs, or refining focus group questions together.

Making sense of what you collected

It’s important that evaluations not only collect data but also support the interpretation of that data. We also call this process sense-making. This step turns information into learning, recommendations, and decisions.

A few ideas for making sense of data include:

Compare results to your goals

Using project goals, objectives, or performance targets to understand progress

Use evaluation rubrics

Apply clear criteria to assess the quality or progress of your work

Make meaningful comparisons

Compare results with relevant benchmarks, previous results, or other meaningful points of reference

Make sense of data together

Engage project team members, partners, participants, or other interest holders in interpreting findings and considering what they mean for the project.

Remember, how you collect and make sense of evaluation data impacts how you answer your evaluation questions, make decisions about implementing and sustaining your project, and develop or identify new ideas.

Additional Resources on Creating and Understanding Data Collected

National Science Foundation Logo EvaluATE is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number 2332143. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed on this site are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.