Principal Investigator’s Guide to Managing Evaluation in Informal Science Education Projects
Edited by Rick Bonney, Leslie Goodyear, and Kirsten Ellenbogen
An initiative of the Visitor Studies Association, produced in partnership with the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education
This guide is designed to support the useful integration of evaluation and project design in informal learning environments. The primary audience for the guide is professionals who are working with evaluators as part of an informal STEM education project, including current PIs as well as individuals who are developing a proposal to any directorate of the National Science Foundation (NSF) that addresses informal STEM education. This is NOT a how-to guide on developing and implementing project evaluations. Many valuable resources already provide that information. Instead, this guide is focused on understanding the use and application of evaluation in informal STEM education projects to improve partnerships between project teams and their evaluators.
While the final format of the guide is still being developed, the current plan is to produce it as a dynamic website that will be integrated with other publications and websites focused on ISE infrastructure including CAISE, informalscience.org, visitorstudies.org, and the Informal Commons. Each section of the guide and site will link to existing resources, list recommended reading, include worksheets where appropriate, and make connections to NSF’s Online Project Monitoring System.
By design, most of the authors are not professional evaluators. Rather, they are ISE project leaders who have developed effective means of collaborating with evaluators through many years of experience.
The table of contents for the guide is below. Clicking on a title will take you the current draft of that chapter.
We welcome any feedback and encourage you to comment on the overall quality, its value to you, missing information, or other ways in which we can improve the guide. Please send feedback to evaluation@caise.insci.org.
Please note that this guide is not a NSF policy document. While the authors and editors have done their best to reflect current thinking of NSF staff, all questions about NSF policy should be directed toward an appropriate NSF program officer.
Table of Contents
The Value of Evaluation: Why it Matters to Your Work
Rachel Hellenga
Understanding Evaluation: Guiding Ideas for You to Know
Lauren Russell
Finding an Evaluator: Matching Project Needs with Evaluator Skills and Competencies
Mary Marcussen
Creating the Evaluation Plan: Setting Goals, Determining Indicators of Success, and Developing Evaluation Questions
Tina Phillips and Rick Bonney
Evaluation in Action: How to Get the Most out of Working with Your Evaluator
Jessica Luke, Steve Yalowitz, and Sasha Palmquist
Evaluation Results: Getting and Disseminating the Report You Need
Saskia Traill and Rachel Hellenga
Building a Culture of Evaluation into an Institution
Preeti Gupta
Download the full document here.
