STEM Excellence and Leadership Data Manuals

The STEM Excellence and Leadership project is an NSF-funded Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) Research in Service to Practice project of the University of Iowa’s Belin-Blank International Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development (B-BC). This project addressed the need to provide economically-disadvantaged rural-students with informal STEM learning opportunities that place high-potential students on path for developing STEM expertise and qualifications for advanced STEM careers. The project team used a mixed methods approach, integrating comparative case study and mixed effects longitudinal methods, to study the STEM Excellence program. Data sources include teacher interviews, classroom observations, and student assessments of academic aptitude and psychosocial outcomes. This document provides information about the quantitative and qualitative data collected and analyzed for this project with hopes that it informs future research and evaluation efforts for STEM education in rural contexts.