The MSP Program's diverse nature leads to the need for an evaluation consisting of a series of substudies. The substudies draw from a variety of original and secondary data sources: site visits of individual awardees; interviews of PIs; analyses of the MSP-MIS database; and meta-analyses of the awardees' annual and evaluation reports. The analyses include the latest statistical and qualitative methods. Field-based data collection is carefully coordinated with the MSP awardees, to minimize their burden and avoid potential redundancy with other ongoing data collection efforts.

The MSP-PE is led by COSMOS Corporation with Robert K. Yin serving as principal investigator (PI) and Darnella Davis serving as one of three co-principal Investigators. Additional co-principal Investigators and their partnering institutions are Prof. Patricia Moyer-Packenham at Utah State University and Prof. Kenneth Wong at Brown University. Prof. Dimiter Dimitrov at George Mason University has led the analysis of K-12 student achievement trends.