TIG Sessions 2020

AEA Conference TIG Sessions 2020

A Conversation with Veronica G Thomas

Veronica G Thomas will talk with the TIG about her new book with Pat Campbell, Evaluation in Today's World: Respecting Diversity, Improving Quality, and Promoting Usability

STEM TIG Annual Business Meeting

We will elect our 2021 TIG Leadership team, which has expanded greatly from previous years. Maybe you will see something in the available positions for yourself when we accept nominations next October for 2022!

The meeting will begin by sharing what we have been up to this year as a TIG, and confirming board nominations for next year (for 15 minutes max), and then a conversational interview with Veronica for the remaining time, including questions from you!

  • Oct 26, 2020 03:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
  • Register in advance here (link removed). Registration is required; once you register you will get a follow-up email with log-in information.

Shining a light on intensive out-of-school STEM programs for youth from under-represented populations: Choosing and using methodologies for long-term impact evaluation

Where are those high-school participants now? How and what did their out-of-school STEM program contribute to STEM involvement? Drawing from three long-term impact evaluations of high-school internship programs, this demonstration presents youth-development program evaluators with methodologies and lessons learned specifically in the areas of model development and testing, locating participants and data collection, data coding and analysis, and accounting for non-response bias. These methodologies help answer questions like, What parts of the program made a difference? How did extra-program influences affect program impact? How do we locate program alums? What if the responding alums are biased toward the program? The demonstration draws from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History's YES! Internship-program tenth-anniversary study; Wildlife Conservation Society's NSF funded four-year longitudinal study of Project TRUE and the NSF-funded Roads Taken 15-25-year causal-modeling study of 2,000 alums from intensive high-school science center-based programs.

  • Laura Blanton, Deborah Wasserman, Moira Ragan
  • 3:00 PM - 3:45 PM EDT on Tuesday, October 27

Evaluating an NSF INCLUDES Initiative: A Change Is Gonna Come, But How Do We Evaluate It?

NSF INCLUDES (National Science Foundation Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science) is a national initiative that aims to broaden participation of underrepresented groups through a network of Design and Development Launch Pilots and Alliances. This session shines a light on evaluation strategies utilized by four NSF INCLUDES projects. The first addresses the challenges of evaluating system change in a statewide Alliance designed to promote the persistence of rural, first-generation STEM college students. The second describes the use of evaluation findings in the development of a Networked Improvement Community composed of minority serving institutions that are striving to improve STEM outcomes for minority males. The third describes the use of social network analysis in evaluating an Alliance that seeks to promote computing opportunities for Hispanics. The fourth describes challenges in evaluating a multi-state collective impact effort designed to change STEM education pathways.

  • Caitlin Howley, Cindy Ziker, Ginger Fitzhugh, Sarah Hug, Karen Peterman, Johnavae Campbell
  • 10:30 AM - 11:15 AM EDT on Thursday, October 29