TY - JOUR
T1 - Evaluation Capacity Building for Informal STEM Education
T2 - Working for Success Across the Field
AU - Bequette, Marjorie
AU - Cardiel, Christopher L.B.
AU - Cohn, Sarah
AU - Kollmann, Elizabeth Kunz
AU - Lawrenz, Frances
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., and the American Evaluation Association
PY - 2019/3/1
Y1 - 2019/3/1
N2 - Informal STEM education (ISE) organizations, especially museums, have used evaluation productively but unevenly. We argue that advancing evaluation in ISE requires that evaluation capacity building (ECB) broadens to include not only professional evaluators but also other professionals such as educators, exhibit developers, activity facilitators, and institutional leaders. We identify four categories of evaluation capacity: evaluation skill and knowledge, use of evaluation, organizational systems related to conducting or integrating evaluation, and values related to evaluation. We studied a field-wide effort to build evaluation capacity across a network of organizations and found it important to address individuals’ evaluation capacities as well as capacities at the organizational level. Organizational factors that support ECB included redundancy of evaluation capacities across multiple people in an organization, institutional coherence around the value of evaluation, and recognition that ECB can be led from multiple levels of an organizational hierarchy. We argue that the increasing emphasis on evaluation in the ISE field represents an exciting opportunity and that, with targeted strategies and investments, ECB holds great promise for the future of ISE and ISE evaluation.
AB - Informal STEM education (ISE) organizations, especially museums, have used evaluation productively but unevenly. We argue that advancing evaluation in ISE requires that evaluation capacity building (ECB) broadens to include not only professional evaluators but also other professionals such as educators, exhibit developers, activity facilitators, and institutional leaders. We identify four categories of evaluation capacity: evaluation skill and knowledge, use of evaluation, organizational systems related to conducting or integrating evaluation, and values related to evaluation. We studied a field-wide effort to build evaluation capacity across a network of organizations and found it important to address individuals’ evaluation capacities as well as capacities at the organizational level. Organizational factors that support ECB included redundancy of evaluation capacities across multiple people in an organization, institutional coherence around the value of evaluation, and recognition that ECB can be led from multiple levels of an organizational hierarchy. We argue that the increasing emphasis on evaluation in the ISE field represents an exciting opportunity and that, with targeted strategies and investments, ECB holds great promise for the future of ISE and ISE evaluation.
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U2 - 10.1002/ev.20351
DO - 10.1002/ev.20351
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85062211257
SN - 1097-6736
VL - 2019
SP - 107
EP - 123
JO - New Directions for Evaluation
JF - New Directions for Evaluation
IS - 161
ER -