Module 4 - R&E | STELAR - STEM Learning and Research Center

Module 4 - Research

R & E

Aligning Research and Evaluation

ITEST projects include both research and evaluation. This tab provides some ideas for how to align your research and evaluation plans and how to distinguish research from evaluation in your proposal.

ITEST proposals must include a description of the research that (a) addresses the ITEST Pillars; (b) includes a carefully described research plan with all the components described in the previous tab (Tab 4: Design); and (c) contributes to the Intellectual Merit of the proposal. Proposals also mustinclude a description of the evaluation plan that answers two overarching questions: (1) Is the project making sufficient progress toward meeting the goals and objectives? and (2) What are the intellectual merits and broader impacts of the project with respect to its intended outcomes?

What is the difference between research and evaluation?

This question has come up numerous times!

In some cases there can be confusion about differences between research and evaluation, and different projects address this potential confusion differently. There is not a single “correct” way to resolve the confusion if it arises, but it is important to come up with a resolution for the proposal you are working on. Here are some things to consider as you prepare the research and evaluation components.

Rather than thinking about research versus evaluation, it can be helpful to think about aligning research and evaluation.
One way to distinguish the two is thatresearch includes activities designed to contribute to the field, while evaluation includes activities designed to build understanding of the specific project. For example, a research question may examine how students develop their STEM career interests, while an evaluation question would determine whether the project met its STEM career development goals. There can be significant overlap in activities with a project that seeks to do both, so the proposal will haveto make clear the distinction between the two.
Evaluation often has a formative component that creates a feedback loop to help the project make changes throughout the life of the project in response to that feedback. This also can be described as an element of design-based implementation research that allows an iterative development of the intervention.
Evaluation also has a summative component that helps to describe how well the project did what it said it would do.
The research plan hasto include multiple elements that demonstrate you are prepared to carry out a carefully designed study (see Section 4: Design), including descriptions of instrumentation and analysis plans.

In your proposal, be sure to clarify which questions are your research questions and which are your evaluation questions. These should be written as two separate sections in the proposal.