Brown's 8 questions

Planning the next paper (4):

1. Who are the intended readers: grant bodies/grant application reviewers/ grant applicants
2. What did you do: Three recipients of locally funded learning and teaching project grants were 'followed' as they conducted their research projects over 12-18 months. There were three interviews with the project managers (beginning middle and end of project). And one interview with the project leaders (the person who applied for the grant and had the initial idea). Other project documentation was also used as evidence / data and project meetings were attended were relevant. The questions which guided the data collection were developed from the literature.
3. Why did you do it: To collect evidence as it was being generated rather than retrospectively when people have to 'recall' information which may be influenced by their perception of evaluation and other unknown factors. To see how perceptions changed over the course of the project and what influencing factors caused these changes.
4. what happened: all three had different experiences and perceptions of evaluation to begin with. This appeared to dictate how they conducted the evaluations and what they evaluated and what they did with any evaluation data.
5. What do the results mean in theory: don't know at this stage....
6. What do the results mean in practice: production of guidelines for project evaluation for/from the grant funding body. Development of a framework to guide project evaluation could arise from the findings.
7. What is the key benefit for readers: the grant bodies (ie application reviewers) could use the findings to guide their application and review processes. Academics and project leaders could use this framework to support them in their learning through the project and enable the institution to benefit more widely from the projects. 
8. What remains unsolved: How this framework could best be implemented, feedback from use of the framework.