Creating Common Instruments to Evaluate Education and Diversity Impacts across Three Engineering Research Centers

Design and Development: NSF Engineering Research Centers Unite: Developing and Testing a Suite of Instruments to Enhance Overall Education Program Evaluation

“…TEEC has recently completed the third revision of the MERCII survey leveraging the constantly expanding expertise of the team. Coordinated iterative cycles of reflection and action were used for instrument development [30][31]. The instrument currently has seven baseline categories that could be applied to all ERC population groups and will be used to conduct cross-ERC comparisons.…”

Streamlining the Process of Evaluating the Education and Diversity Impacts across Engineering Research Centers

“…The instrument proposed in this study was driven from NSF guidelines [4]. NSF suggests five categories to be evaluated by all ERC education programs: understanding of the ERC, skill sets, mentorship experience, future plans, and program satisfaction [3].…”

“…A four-step iterative process was used to develop this instrument (see [4] for additional details regarding this process). The consortium first reviewed existing evaluation tools previously created by each of the three participating ERCs.…”

“…A consortium of three ERCs (Center for Bio-mediated and Bio-inspired Geotechnics (CBBG), Nanosystems Center for Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT), and Center for Quantum Energy and Sustainable Solar Technologies lab (QESST)) at Arizona State University banded together to form the Tri-ERC Education Consortium (TEEC). Supported directly by NSF through supplemental funding, this collaboration sought to address this need through a streamlined common instrument that can be applied across ERCs to evaluate ERCs' impact on education and diversity [4],. The consortium brought education leaders, researchers, and independent evaluators from the participating ERCs on board to work together.…”

“…The impact of the educational and diversity components has been studied broadly, including undergraduate student development from research experiences [3][4][5], teacher growth from RET experiences [6][7][8], undergraduate curriculum development [5,6], engineering undergraduate student recruitment [7,8], K-12 student impacts from ERC outreach activities [9], graduate student mentoring skill development from summer programming [10,11], and diversity and inclusion [12,13]. The various evaluation efforts of each of the ERC components listed reflect overall limitations in replicability across sites.…”