Youth Teamwork Skills Survey: Manual and Survey

STEM out-of-school time (OST) programs play an important role in helping youth develop the 21st century skills they need to prepare them for the workforce, particularly the teamwork skills necessary for the growing collaborative nature of work in STEM (National Research Council, 2015). However, there is a lack of appropriate tools to evaluate this key programmatic outcome in STEM OST settings. Through funding from the National Science Foundation, we carried out the Collaboration in the 21st Century (C2C) project to help address this need by developing and validating a survey, the Youth Teamwork Skills Survey, to measure the teamwork skill of team communication in middle and high school STEM OST programs. The development and validation process for the Youth Teamwork Skills Survey resulted in a survey that evaluators can be confident will gather reliable data, has adequate validity evidence for use with STEM OST programs, and is grounded in what actually occurs in these programs.

This manual includes the survey as well as information about how team communication skills are defined and measured through the survey, a description of the the reliability and validity evidence for the survey, how to use the survey for evaluation, instructions for administering and scoring the survey, and how to analyze the results.