Summative Evaluation Report on STEM Evaluation Community

In 2017, the Education Development Center (EDC) received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to bring together PIs of STEM Program Resource Centers (PRC) funded under NSF’s Education and Human Resources (EHR), evaluators of NSF STEM projects and programs, and evaluation advisors to address concerns about the quality and consistency of STEM evaluations. According to the grant proposal, the goal was “to increase the capacity of evaluators to produce high quality, conceptually sound, methodologically appropriate evaluations of NSF programs and projects, specifically in the area of STEM education and outreach” (EDC Grant Proposal, 2017). Primary activities undertaken to this end included three 2-day meetings with members of what became the STEM Evaluation Community (STEM EC) and production of two studies (a landscape study of the STEM Evaluation resources and an evaluator survey) between December, 2017 and July, 2019.

The evaluation of the STEM EC project was designed as a Responsive Evaluation. This report address the two questions guiding the evaluation:

1. What types of value creation do the STEM EC activities and strategies yield?
2. What evidence do we have that strategies employed by the STEM EC have built capacity of the community to conduct methodologically appropriate and conceptually sound evaluations?