Evaluation Under Pressure: Balancing the Needs of the ISE Field with the Needs of Individual Projects

With increased resources and professionalism come increased expectations for the evaluation of individual projects to also provide field-­wide evidence for the impact of ISE. But there has not been a significant growth in the use of psychometric measures that are validated to support field-­wide assessments and norm-­referenced tests for the field. This essay argues that expectations for the field to adopt normed assessments need to be contextualized in the practice and realities of ISE evaluation. While at the same time, evaluators of ISE projects need to build upon stepping stones such as metadata to build toward the use of shared measures that are adaptable to specific projects and sensitive to the constraints of conducting evaluation in informal STEM learning environments.