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

Teachers’ Evaluation of the Usability of a Self-Assessment Tool for Mobile Learning Integration in the Classroom

“…Use standardized measurements: use standardized measures, such as the System Usability Scale (SUS), to evaluate the usability of the tool and compare it with other tools [26,32].…”

Developing common qualitative tools for cross ERC education program evaluation

“…The NSF-funded project aims to provide a new approach to assessing the effectiveness of education and professional development programs within and across ERCs, by developing a suite of common evaluation tools that can be used by all ERCs and similarly structured largescale science and technology research centers [4]. The development of the suite of common evaluation tools will not only reduce ERC external evaluators' workload in creating tools for individual centers, and enhance the evaluation quality and efficiency, but also make it possible to expand and share evaluation findings across ERCs.…”

“…The project began with the effort to develop a streamlined quantitative instrument that can be used across ERC participant groups (e.g., faculty members, year-long research assistants, and summer interns) [4,[7][8]. A quantitative instrument alone will not fit all the evaluation needs for every ERC as the quantitative instrument does not provide detailed information behind the scale scores.…”

“…Limited work has responded to these limitations despite NSF's encouragement for cross-center collaboration in program evaluation. A collaborative consortium initiated direct, conscientious work to combat these ongoing issues during ERC evaluation and was awarded a 3-year NSF grant to conduct these activities [4]. This paper reports the year-one achievement in qualitative tools development.…”

Design and Testing of a Quantitative Instrument to Evaluate Engineering Research Center Participation

“…Studies of these programs have explored their impact on participants, including attitudinal changes and knowledge acquisition of participating undergraduate students [4][5][6], overall impact on K-14 participants [7,8], and engagement, diversity, and content knowledge of high school participants [9,10]. These efforts provide insights regarding specific scenarios but inconsistencies in approaches have minimized the greater possible impact of center evaluations [11,12]. Large-scale, cooperative efforts are essential to further innovation and effective practices emerging from such centers [11].…”