PROGRAM & PROJECT EVALUATION
The Henry Luce Foundation Clare Boothe Luce Program for Women in STEM awards grants to colleges and universities funding Undergraduate Scholarships, Undergraduate Research Awards, Graduate Fellowships and Assistant/Associate Professorships with the goal of encouraging women to enter science, mathematics and engineering fields. University of Washington's Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity (CERSE) focuses on conducting high quality program evaluation and research to improve equity and broaden representation in STEM fields, with a focus on higher education. CERSE has partnered with Collaborative Solutions Consulting to conduct an evaluation of the Clare Boothe Luce Program for Women in STEM.
This formative and summative evaluation of the Clare Booth Luce (CBL) Program for Women in STEM aims to inform and support program improvements to ensure the program is continuously effective in reaching its intended outcomes; assess the extent to which desired program outcomes have been achieved; and assess overall program impacts on awardees' sense of belonging, identity, self-efficacy, confidence, professional development, skill growth, work-life balance, and persistence in STEM higher education/careers.
Cornell University is one of seven institutions across the U.S. to receive funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), through a program aimed at increasing minority faculty in the biomedical sciences. The Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) Program aims to increase the number of minoritized faculty in the biological biomedical and health sciences by hiring and retaining 10 new assistant professors in three research clusters (quantitative biomedical sciences; infection biology; and health equity); fostering sustainable institutional culture change; enhancing faculty development, retention, progression and promotion; evaluating and learning from its hiring, climate and faculty development approaches.
This formative and summative evaluation focuses on assessing and monitoring FIRST program activities to ensure they are meeting their planned goals, providing continuous learning and program improvement feedback to ensure the highest success of the cohort and activities, and ensuring integration and synergy with the Coordination and Evaluation Center (CEC) to facilitate overall program evaluation and outcome tracking.
The American Physical Society (APS) is a nonprofit membership organization that works to advance and disseminate physics knowledge through research journals, scientific meetings, education, outreach, advocacy, and international activities. The APS Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity Alliance (APS-IDEA) initiative aims to empower and support physics departments, laboratories, and other organizations to identify and enact strategies for improving equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) by establishing a community of transformation.
This formative and summative evaluation, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, focuses on assessing progress toward APS IDEA goals and providing ongoing feedback to the Steering Committee and network regarding emergent team needs, challenges, and successes. APS IDEA goals include empowering teams in the network and supporting them in developing and achieving specific diversity, equity and inclusion goals for their department/institution/organization.
The Freshman Initiative for Research to Engage Students (FIRES) program at San José State University (SJSU), funded by the W.M. Keck Foundation, engages freshmen students in authentic research experiences to develop research-related skills, scientific understanding, and self-confidence, and aims to increase research activities in the College of Science.
This formative and summative evaluation focuses on assessing the quality, effectiveness and impacts of the FIRES program and its components. The evaluation monitors progress toward program goals of generating increased interest in STEM and engagement in research to prepare more students for graduate studies in STEM/high paying jobs in Silicon Valley. The evaluation focuses specifically on how the program influences/impacts student confidence, time management, quality of research experiences, pursuit of additional research experiences, interactions with and learning from faculty, development of various marketable skills and knowledge, sense of ownership and broader understanding of their work.
Advancement through Healthy Empowerment, Networking, and Awareness (ATHENA), an NSF ADVANCE Adaptation project, adapts and implements proven interventions from other institutional ADVANCE programs to improve the professional standing and career opportunities for women STEM faculty . The project addresses systemic inequity issues, including aspects of climate and culture that impede advancement of women; low recruitment and retention of women and other underrepresented groups; period of time it takes women STEM faculty to achieve the rank of professor relative to male counterparts; professional isolation including limited involvement of women in research collaborations.
This formative and summative evaluation focuses on assessing the quality, effectiveness and impacts of the ATHENA interventions. The evaluation monitors progress toward goals aimed to improve the professional standing and career opportunities for women STEM faculty. These include reduced isolation, increased opportunities for collaboration in research, increased on-time promotions, increased recruitment and retention, support with career progress during major life events, improved awareness of data-driven equity issues affecting women faculty across multiple identities, and reduced levels of discrimination and harassment.
The American Physical Society (APS) is a nonprofit membership organization that works to advance and disseminate physics knowledge through research journals, scientific meetings, education, outreach, advocacy, and international activities. The National Mentoring Community (NMC) is an effort by APS to increase the number of physics degrees earned by underrepresented minority students. The NMC facilitates and supports mentoring relationships between African American, Hispanic American, and Native American undergraduate physics students and local physics mentors. The APS NMC Conference is organized in partnership with National Society for Black Physicists and National Society for Hispanic Physicists. The National Mentoring Community Conference includes workshops focused on mentoring, inclusivity, graduate school, career preparation and school-work-life balance; plenary talks focused on physics research, mentoring and inclusivity; undergraduate research presentations; a networking fair; and various other networking opportunities, including a social event for students.
This mixed- methods evaluation focused on assessing attendee experiences at the conference, identifying conference components that worked well and areas for improvement, determining whether participants learned about/more about conference topics, and making recommendations to improve and optimize future conferences.
Chasteen Educational Consulting conducted an evaluation of American Physical Society's Committee for Status of Women in Physics Site Visit process. The evaluation focused on informing the site visit redesign process, which aimed to address common challenges that arose with previous site visits.
This subcontracting project focused on providing equity and diversity expertise to the evaluation. This included reviewing site visit documents with an equity lens and providing feedback and recommendations to improve the site visit process.
The Louis Stokes STEM Pathways and Research Alliance: Pacific Northwest (PNW LSAMP) aims to broaden participation in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) by integrating academic and social supports to build community, engage underrepresented minority (URM) students in undergraduate research, and increase their entry into advanced STEM degree programs and professional careers.
This formative and summative evaluation focuses on monitoring annual student progress toward the STEM degree attainment goals; informing research conference and other program improvements; examining connections/relationships between student program participation and outcomes; and tracking and monitoring research project dissemination.
Valuing the Social in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), an NSF CAREER Grant, is an integrated research and education program investigating the relationship between cultural values , norms and practices that presume practitioners from dominant groups are more competent than practitioners from underrepresented groups; and privilege technical domains over social ones. The research goals are to use ethnography to compare subfields of CSE that have different levels of participation by women to ascertain if subfield cultures vary. The educational goals include developing learning modules and course curricula to educate students, faculty, and leaders in academia and industry about the benefits of diversity and transformations required to welcome and retain women, especially women of color, in CSE.
This formative and summative evaluation focuses on informing student and practitioner workshop improvements; understanding the impacts of workshop participation on CalPoly Civil Engineering students, faculty, and aspects of the department climate and culture; and assessing the accuracy and quality of workshop learning modules and curricula.
The Lioness Tale Prison Project (LiT-uPP) brings transformational tools for spiritual freedom and emotional literacy to women serving long term to life prison sentences at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla. Participants then facilitate the sharing of these resources throughout their prison community.
This evaluation focuses on designing a plan with formative and summative components to inform program improvements and assess and share program impacts with funders and other stakeholders to sustain and scale the program.
NCWIT is a non-profit community that convenes, equips, and unites change leader organizations to increase the meaningful participation of all women — at the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, age, sexual orientation, and disability status — in the influential field of computing, particularly in terms of innovation and development.
This evaluation focused on assessing impacts and informing improvements of the Extension Services for Undergraduate Program, a customized consulting program that helps academic departments of computing develop high-impact strategies for recruiting and retaining more women students.
The UW College of Engineering is dedicated to cultivating a welcoming and inclusive college climate by maintaining college-wide and unit-specific cultures that embrace and celebrate diversity, equity and inclusion; and utilizing data-driven, peer-reviewed best practices when we develop and design new programs and evaluate current programs.
The Diversity Action Plans project was a collaborative, cross-departmental initiative to develop engineering department diversity profiles and a set of recommendations. based on the analysis of undergraduate and graduate student demographic, survey, and focus group data.
Seattle University Program for New Principals was a blended coaching program where veteran school leaders provided continuing support to school administrators just starting their careers.
