Community STEM Outreach: Summative Evaluation

The Community STEM Outreach Project at the Saint Louis Science Center (SLSC) received funding from the United States Office of Naval Research (ONR) from October 2010 through September 2013. Klein Consulting, with support from Tisdal Consulting, conducted the evaluation of the three-year project. The original proposal from the SLSC to ONR laid the foundation for the Community STEM Outreach Project by describing the institution and its youth program, the Youth Exploring Science (YES) Program. Plans were underway to reach out to existing and new national partners to document and disseminate a successful, replicable, and scalable STEM-focused youth program, YES. The Community STEM Outreach Project was designed to use that dissemination “to meet the Navy’s goal of outreach to the best prepared and brightest youth who will serve as the next generation of Naval recruits to serve our country." The intent was not to use the program to recruit youth to join the Navy after high school. Instead, the idea was to use the YES Program model to create a national collaboration and comprehensive approach to develop programs across the country that were “designed to effectively meet the nation’s needs for the next generation of STEM experts and leaders," whether those experts and leaders are in the military, in STEM fields that support the military, or in fields that support the nation in other roles.