Methodological Resources

The resources below are a mixture of original resources developed by the Education Evaluation Core, resources developed by others, and scholarly publications. For copyright reasons, we cannot provide PDF files of journal articles. However, if you are a Boston University employee, you should be able to access all of the articles cited here through the BU library website after providing your log-in credentials.

Research and Evaluation Planning

Developing an effective evaluation plan: a workbook

Types of evaluation and types of evaluator

Survey Design

How to create a bad survey instrument

You can’t fix what you’ve spoiled by design: Developing survey instruments and collecting validity evidence

Ten key things to consider when designing surveys

Survey Data Collection

Through Boston University, employees have access to Qualtrics. If you are interested in learning more about how to use Qualtrics, you can attend one of the trainings conducted by IT (a list of upcoming trainings can be found here). Or, you can visit the Qualtrics website which offers great step-by-step instructions and screenshots, found here.

Tips for improving survey response rate

Quantitative Analysis

All Boston University employees have access to SPSS for quantitative analysis.

UCLA’s Institute for Digital Computing and Education (IDRE) offers excellent tutorials for data analysis in SAS, SPSS, R and Stata. Visit them here:
UCLA IDRE Data Analysis Tutorials

Qualitative Analysis

All Boston University employees have access to NVivo  for qualitative analysis.

Developing Semi-Structured Interview Guides

Approaches to Analyzing Qualitative Data