The use of NVivo in the evaluation of higher education initiatives. Understand the various challenges faced and successes realized in the analyses of these various data sets. First is a two-year study of an innovative teacher education program where NVivo was used in a comparative analysis. Second was the use of NVivo in the analysis of qualitative responses from surveys.

1. NVivo in Education Research
Two Examples from New Mexico
April 16, 2015

2. Introduction
• To illustrate the use of NVivo in education research by
highlighting its application in two recent projects
conducted in New Mexico

3. The Projects:
Co-Teaching Collaborative Schools Initiative
CNM Faculty Evaluation Survey Analysis

4. What it is
A model for teacher training. The method depends heavily on a mentorship
arrangement whereby a student teacher, known as a teacher candidate, works
with an experienced teacher, known as a co-operating teacher, from the
collaborating school and an embedded faculty member from the college of
education over a three-semester period. The cooperating teacher serves as a
mentor for the teacher candidate providing guidance in skill development, co-
teaching strategies and enculturation into the school community. The embedded
faculty member provides a presence at the school to help mitigate any issues or
conflicts that may arise in relation to the program operations and provides
additional support for the teacher candidates.
Co-Teaching Collaborative Schools Initiative

5. Data Sources
For this project, there were a number of data sources including: student level
quantitative data collected from the district; weekly monitoring data submitted by
each of the teacher candidates; and guided discussion group transcripts.
Co-Teaching Collaborative Schools Initiative

6. Challenges
A challenge worth discussing surrounds the transcripts. Because the discussion groups were held in
school buildings it was not uncommon for bells to interrupt the exchanges and actually overwhelm and
drown out what the participants were addressing. While this did not happen with great regularity, when it
did it was frustrating to have the narrative disrupted or drowned out and thus make part of the text
useless.
Another challenge relates to the transcripts and the way that the discussion groups functioned. In their
enthusiasm to get their point across, at times some participants would talk across each other, thus
resulting in a very choppy transcript copy. I overcame this issue by “over highlighting” text that was
dropped into a node. I would have to wait for downloading the node reports into a Word document then
stripping out the various streams of narrative by participant and restringing these together. When these
coding issues arose they tended to eat up a fair amount of time.
Co-Teaching Collaborative Schools Initiative

7. CNM Faculty Evaluation Survey

8. What it is
CNM is the acronym for the Community College of New Mexico located in
Albuquerque, NM. It provides several different training and certificate programs as
well as awarding an associate’s degree in various disciplines. At the time of the
administration of the survey, the school faculty was comprised of a total of 320
full-time and 730 part-time faculty. In the spring of 2014, the school’s faculty
senate conducted a survey comprised of 6 questions for full-time and 5 questions
for part-time faculty to collect input on the faculty evaluation system. The
response rate from full-time faculty was 96 or ~30% and 188 for part-time or
roughly 25.8%.
CNM Faculty Evaluation Survey

9. Data Sources
Members of the CNM Faculty Senate were the ones that comprised the questions and administered the
survey via Survey Monkey. Faculty members received a series of emails requesting they complete the
survey and after a set period the survey was shut down and the data downloaded. In both surveys, the
first question requested that respondents rank in order a series of 6 elements the Senate identified as
applying to the evaluation process for each of the two faculty groups.
After answering this one, the faculty then responded to a set of questions that addressed each of the
previously ordered items. The full-time faculty received one additional question that addressed their
perspective on separate teaching and professional review cycles that was not applicable to part-time
faculty.
While the first question resulted in the production of quantitative data, which was analyzed in Excel, the
remaining questions produced open-ended responses. It was with these where I applied NVivo in the
evaluation.
CNM Faculty Evaluation Survey

10. Challenges
For this particular project, the challenge was tied to the variance in responses
made by the faculty to each of the questions. While there was a high enough
degree of consistency in responses that allowed for coding across a handful of
nodes, a sufficient number faculty responded in ways that resulted in the creation
of one or two response nodes. To deal with these smaller item nodes, the decision
was made to establish a three-item threshold to report a response category in the
response graphs.
CNM Faculty Evaluation Survey

11. Presenter:
Scott D. Hughes, PhD
University of New Mexico Center for Education Policy Research
shughe58@unm.edu