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8 Feb 2011

Westat Developed User-Friendly Handbook for Project Evaluation

Westat, US, has developed the 2010 User-Friendly Handbook for Project Evaluation (page in PDF format) for the National Science Foundation (NSF). This handbook is a revision of the NSF 2002 User-Friendly Handbook for Project Evaluation (NSF 02-057). It provides project directors and principal investigators working with NSF with a basic guide for evaluating NSF's educational projects.

NSF is an independent agency of the U.S. Government that is the funding source for approximately 20 percent of all federally supported basic research conducted by America's colleges and universities. In many fields such as mathematics, computer science, and the social sciences, NSF is the major source of federal backing.

NSF fulfills its mission chiefly by issuing limited-term grants—currently about 10,000 new awards per year, with an average duration of 3 years—to fund specific research proposals that have been judged the most promising by a rigorous and objective merit-review system.

This new handbook will be invaluable to people who need to learn more about both the value of evaluation and how to design and carry out an evaluation. It builds on firmly established principles, blending technical knowledge and common sense to meet the needs of funding agencies and programme implementors.

Joy Frechtling, Ph.D., a Westat Vice President who directed the work and revised the previous version, noted, "We are pleased to be able to release this updated version. The 2010 Handbook provides all the basic information of its predecessors, along with some special chapters by Dr. Debra Rog and Mel Mark." The 2010 Handbook was produced under contract to Westat from the NSF Directorate for Education and Human Resources.

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