Defining, Enhancing, and Documenting Impact of STEM Education and Public Outreach Projects Through a Quantitative Collaborative Impact Analysis Evaluation Method

摘要

Evaluation of the impact of STEM EPO efforts has now been recognized by policy makers and funders as critical for demonstrating their effects. While this is important and long overdue, it overlooks an equally important function of evaluation--informing the needs assessment, objectives, design, and implementation of a project. As more evaluation is required, there is an opportunity to move from an external evaluation of a project performed by a third party to embedding evaluation in both the work and cognitive framework of the STEM EPO professional. This paper describes the development and use of a collaborative evaluation method with the NASA Astrobiology Institute's (NAI) STEM EPO projects to both enhance and document their impact.