Assessing student outcomes based on standardized test scores and administrative student records is challenging under the best of circumstances. This presentation will address these challenges of data collection and management in a multi-year, multi-school district random assignment evaluation of a teacher professional development program in 50 schools. As with many studies, this research hinges on effectively managing data collection and management processes to get clean, organized student data--yet these important processes are often not discussed in proposals or study designs. This presentation highlights the necessity of incorporating such processes into proposal writing and study designs. Topics to be discussed include developing and maintaining data contacts with each school district; deciding which data elements are necessary and attainable; requesting data elements in ways that require the least amount of 'cleaning'; developing secure protocols for data transfers; normalizing data elements across multiple data sources, and merging data files.#2009Conference #Evaluation2009