What should be contained in evaluation plans varies slightly within EHR divisions. Proposers should refer to the evaluation section within each program's section in the NSF Program Announcement and Guidelines . The guidelines below are limited to the three basic plan components. The most common purposes for evaluating EHR projects tend to be formative and summative. Formative evaluation gathers information about a project's implementation and progress to help project staff monitor, improve, and refine it as it develops.
Formative purposes are generally appropriate in the early years of the project.
A summative evaluation collects evidence about a project's processes and outcomes. It clarifies whether the program goals have been attained once the project interventions and implementation procedures have stabilized and had time to realize their intended impacts. Summative evaluations are often conducted during the culminating year in a project's funding cycle to inform decisions about the project's continuation, expansion, or termination. Evaluation Questions Evaluation questions should be formulated so that they clearly relate to project goals, are measurable, and can be answered by systematic data collection. The evaluation design specifies the data collection approaches that will be used to answer the evaluation questions.