September 9th, 2026
Deborah Wasserman (Principal Investigator) shares about the project: Roads Taken: A Long-Term Follow-up Study of Program Strategies and Long-term Impacts of Intensive, Multi-year, STEM Youth Programs (NSF #1906396).
What is your project’s big idea and what inspired you to start this project?
Deborah: The Roads Taken project sought to conduct a long-term (15 to 25 year) follow-up study of six intensive museum-based youth programs. It led us to recognize the wealth of knowledge stored within each program and how little opportunity youth programs have to learn from each other. Our current IMLS project, Foundations & Bridges, seeks to create opportunities to build bridges and collaborate in support of these programs’ long term outcomes.
How did you conduct outreach with the communities you worked with? OR How did you build trust with the community members that you worked with?
Deborah: To build trust and invite practitioner voices into the work, we are both seeking out engagement opportunities through outreach platforms like REVISE and creating our own spaces for dialogue. We are seeking to provide useful resources and learning opportunities in a way that practitioners and researchers will want to build community and contribute to collaborations that continually create more resources.
Can you share a relevant story about your participants’ learnings/experience?
Deborah: The Exploratorium utilized the Roads Taken conceptual model, questionnaire, and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis methodology to conduct a long-term follow-up study of their Explainer program. In turn, the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy utilized both the Exploratorium and Roads Taken studies to conduct their long-term follow-up study. Now both of these organizations not only have evidence of their important program impact on participants into adulthood but also have established networks for maintaining alumnae(i) contact as resources for both their programs and their organizations.
What recommendations do you have for those who want to do similar work and/or collaborate with similar audiences?
Deborah: To find and collaborate with likeminded colleagues working on STEM-intensive youth programs, we recommend joining the Foundations and Bridges research collaboration network. We are in the process of building out engagement resources and opportunities, and we’ll share updates on that work in our LinkedIn group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/18627008/
What outcomes did your project find?
Deborah: These programs work with young people as their identity is forming. Most all program participants we contacted achieved some combination of intended outcomes. Most all attributed their adult STEM-related achievement at least moderately to their program experience. Where data was available to measure outcome achievement at both program end and adulthood, most change occurred during the program, with little change since. Multiple strategies worked in combination to create these outcomes.
We also have found that program practitioners and researchers are seeking to benefit from each others’ knowledge, experiences, and resources in the areas of program implementation, evaluation, and research; measuring outcomes, maintaining contact with alumni; and conducting longitudinal and long-term follow-up studies. You can read more about this in one of our papers for the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology (Weiss et al, 2025).
What is a challenge you encountered in your project? How did you overcome it?
Deborah: Locating and staying in touch with program alumni presents a much bigger challenge than programs assume. This was a critical element of our project, and it became such an important source of lessons learned that we created a guide for others. You can find this in the attached PDF, Roads Taken – Tips for Reconnecting with Program Alums
When datasets were more limited than we anticipated, Qualitative Comparative Analysis provided a way of making meaning and addressing our research questions. Our process and results are described in another paper for the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology (Wasserman et al, 2025).