Evaluation Resources, Instruments, and Tools

This is an incomplete list. Please add additional resources in the feedback link below.

  • Accelerating Systemic Change in STEM Higher Education (ASCN) has a resource list useful for supporting and studying change. One of the list is Assessment and Communication of Change, which includes tools for assessing student learning, faculty practice, and institutional change, and general assessment resources.
  • The Better Evaluation website and The Rainbow Framework has practices and tools for evaluation.
  • Building Strong Departments: Program Assessment is a resource guide with logic models, practices, and tools for improving departmental programs. It focuses on, but is not limited to, geosciences.
  • The Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL) has online courses and other resources that assist in the design of classroom assessment.
  • Tools for Evidence-based Action (TEA) from The Center of Educational Effectiveness at the University of California Davis has tools to facilitate the use of academic analytics. The ribbon tool is a visualization tool that allows you to understand the pathways that students take through a university over time.
  • The SEARLE Center for advancing learning and teaching has resources for instructors and faculty developers that support student learning. These include resources for assessment in practice, and in courses.
  • Field Tested Learning Assessment Guide (FLAG) is a resource for classroom assessment techniques. It provides an introduction to assessment and builds toward a generalized model of course development. The central precept is that assessment drives student learning. Resources include conceptual diagnostic tests, attitude surveys, and scoring rubrics aligned to a specific STEM discipline.
  • Toward a Descriptive Science of Teaching (TDOP) (Hora, Oleson, and Ferrare, 2013), is a structured classroom observation protocol designed to capture nuances of teaching behaviors in a descriptive manner.
  • The W.K. Kellogg Foundation Evaluation Handbook provides a framework for how to think about evaluation as a tool to support existing programs, and it is written primarily for project directors.
  • Describing and Measuring Undergraduate STEM Teaching Practices is a workshop report discusses how to make decisions about measurement, and addresses such areas as surveying, interviewing, and observing STEM faculty and students, as well as teaching portfolios and combining measurement approaches. The workshop was supported by AAAS and NSF and organized by Charles Henderson and Yolanda George.
  • The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSEE) collects information at hundreds of four-year colleges and universities about first-year and senior students' participation in programs and activities, providing an estimate of how undergraduates spend their time and what they gain from attending college.
  • The Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (FSSE) measures instructional staff (faculty, instructors, graduate students who teach, etc.) expectations for student engagement in educational practices.
  • The Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP) was created by the Evaluation Facilitation Group (EFG) of the Arizona Collaborative for Excellence in the Preparation of Teachers (ACEPT). It is an observational instrument designed to measure "reformed" teaching.
  • Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS), developed by Smith et al. (2013), is a tool to document how students' and instructors' time is spent during class.
  • Teaching Practice Inventory (Wieman and Sarah Gilbert, 2014) is a 10-15 minute survey designed to characterize the teaching practices used in undergraduate science and mathematics courses.
  • Student Understanding of Science and Scientific Inquiry (SUSSI) questionnaire (Liang et al., 2008) is an instrument designed to study nature of science (NOS) views to inform effective instruction and classroom behaviors.
  • The Classroom Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) and the Survey of Undergraduate Research Experiences (SUREIII) are 10-15 min surveys used as pre/post-test or post test only to measure student experiences in a research or research like experience.
  • The HERI Faculty Survey collects information of a wide variety of issues relevant to fauclty. Results from the HERI Faculty Survey have been used in strategic planning, faculty recruitment and retention, faculty development activities, assessment and accreditation, and discussions relating pedagogy to student learning experiences.
  • The Danielson Framework evaluates K-12 teachers using four domains: planning and preparation, classroom environment, instruction, and professional responsibilities.
  • The Science Teaching Efficacy Belief Instrument (STEBI) and the Mathematics Teaching Efficacy Belief Instrument (MTEBI), a modification of the STEBI-B, measures science teaching self-efficacy and mathematics teaching efficacy in preservice teachers.
  • The Online Evaluation Resource Library was developed for professionals seeking to design, conduct, document, or review project evaluations. The library has examples of evaluation plans, instruments, and reports for NSF projects that can be used by researchers as they design proposals and projects.
  • Undergraduate Research Student Self-Assessment (URSSA) is an online survey instrument for use in evaluating student outcomes of undergraduate research experiences in the sciences.
  • The 2010 User-Friendly Handbook for Project Evaluation was developed to provide project directors with a basic guide for evaluating NSF's educational projects.
  • Assessing Women & Men in Engineering (AWE) has instruments related to persistence, diversity, retention, and more for K-16 engineering education. The instruments are available upon registration.
  • MSPnet Library and Resources has resources (including a section on assessment and evaluation) and publications from NSF's MSP and STEM+C projects.
  • Systems Evaluation Protocols from the Cornell University Office for Research on Evaluation (CORE) is an online evaluation system for planning evaluations from a systems perspective. The resources are free but require registration.



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