Factors to consider in making evaluation work for you

Many projects involving robotic telescope education programs do not have published peer-review evaluations (Gomez and Fitzgerald, 2017). Most evaluations in this discipline area tend to be unreliable with questionable methodology and published in non-peer-reviewed conference proceedings or in the grey literature. It is not the case that evaluations are required to be peer-reviewed to be useful to the people running the project, but it is likely that grant funding bodies and other researchers will largely only trust peer-reviewed studies. It is also not the case that evaluations have to be public, they can be done privately for the interest of project personnel and project development alone. Either way, there are many things that need to be considered when planning a project evaluation.