Considerable effort has gone into perfecting the art of tablet data collection, which is the method typically used to collect data for evaluating education programs. The move away from paper has been a welcome shift, as for many research and evaluation professionals, paper conjures images of junior staff buried under boxes of returned questionnaires manually entering data into computers. Indeed, when our team recently began experimenting with paper-based data collection in our education projects, one colleague with decades of experience remarked warily, “It just seems like we’re moving backwards here!”

Improvements in the software, however, allow us to merge new technology with “old school” methods. Digital scanners can now replace manual data entry, powered by software that is able to read completed questionnaires, and quickly format responses into a data set for subsequent analysis. Our team has been experimenting with a new digital scanning software called Gravic to easily and quickly enter data from paper-based surveys. The Gravic digital scanning tool introduces flexibility and opens a new option for data collection across our projects, but not without some drawbacks. In this post, we make the case for paper surveys combined with the Gravic software and then review the drawbacks.