Spring 2018

This time of year, Advanced Technological Education (ATE) project evaluators are preparing evaluation reports for their projects, and principal investigators (PIs) and their project teams are preparing their annual reports for the National Science Foundation (NSF). EvaluATE has a lot of resources to take the mystery out of these activities and enhance the effectiveness and utility of your reports.

Writing Your NSF Annual Report

If you need help determining what should go in your NSF annual report and how to prepare it, see advice on Strategies for Writing Your NSF Annual Report, by Tara Sheffer, supervisor of grant projects at Columbus State Community College.

Reporting Evaluation Results in Your Annual Report to NSF

If you are working on your first annual report to NSF, you may be surprised that there isn’t a section in the online reporting system, Research.gov, explicitly for reporting information from your external evaluation. EvaluATE offers straightforward guidance about how to include your evaluation results in your annual report in What Goes Where? Reporting Evaluation Results to NSF.

Guidance for Effective Evaluation Reporting

Starting an evaluation report from scratch can feel overwhelming. Evaluators can use EvaluATE’s Checklist for Program Evaluation Report Content to determine what content is appropriate for a report and how to organize the information in a coherent way. Project teams can use it to guide conversations with their evaluators about what should go in their evaluation reports.

Get the Word out with One-Page Reports

Don’t let the great information about your project stay buried in long reports that few will read. Highlight key results in a well-designed one-page report that your stakeholders will want—and have time—to read. One-page reports can be used to highlight grant achievements to college and industry stakeholders and to attract potential partners. EvaluATE’s recent webinar and several supporting resource materials clearly explain how to create attention-grabbing one-page reports. Visit our page on One-Page Reports.

ATE Evaluation Report Repository

Did you know EvaluATE has a growing repository of evaluation reports from funded ATE projects? Browse the collection to get a sense of how ATE projects and centers are evaluating their work, what they’re learning, and how they are communicating those results in evaluation reports. Reviewing the reports will also provide insights on what other ATE projects have been funded to do. If you’re an ATE principal investigator or evaluator, let us know if you have a report that we may add to the collection.