With funding from NSF, the Prime the Pipeline Project (P 3) is responding to the need to strengthen the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) pipeline from high school to college by developing and evaluating the scientific village strategy and the culture it creates. The scientific village, a community of high school students, teachers as learners, undergraduate students as mentors, and university scientists as leaders, collaborate to solve challenging long-term problems/projects that develop villagers’ expertise with STEM concepts/skills and give them a taste of the work of

Introduction to a special issue of CITE wherein three ITEST projects are highlighted. The three projects in this issue share characteristics: programs that interweave formal and informal learning environments, incorporation of practices that allow participants to engage with STEM content in a hands-on manner, and a dedication to improving research on project impacts. This editorial describes these characteristics in depth. This article is part of a special issue of Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education (CITE).

Enhancing student learning and understanding by combining theories of learning with the computer’s unique attributes. In “Computational Thinking,” Jeannette Wing struck a chord that has resonated strongly (generating positive as well as negative responses) with many computer scientists and non-computer scientists. In this article, Cooper et al. reframe the way computational thinking is conceptualized and present a new model for computational learning in K-12 education.

This article in Scientific American (August 2014 issue), features the ITEST Research Study, Predicting STEM Career Choice from Computational Indicators of Student Engagement within Middle School Mathematics Classes (see page 72). The article details efforts to bring more rigorous science to classrooms and research that is showing that our intuitions about education may be wrong.

In this special issue, PIs and evaluators from diverse ITEST projects described their professional development practices.

EcoScienceWorks (ESW) is an ecology curriculum that includes targeted simulations and a code block programming challenge developed through an NSF-ITEST grant.

Using May 2009 data from the Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) program, this visual essay takes a closer look at STEM occupations.

Multi-site evaluations are becoming increasingly common in federal funding portfolios. Although much thought has been given to multi-site evaluation, there has been little emphasis on how it might interact with participatory evaluation. Therefore, this paper reviews several National Science Foundation educational, multi-site evaluations for the purpose of examining the extent to which these evaluations are participatory. Based on this examination, the paper proposes a model for implementing multi-site, participatory evaluation.

Multisite evaluations are increasingly being used by the federal government and large foundations. A framework for understanding the variations among multisite evaluations and developing ways to improve them is presented in this chapter.

Publicly funded multisite evaluations should help bring safe, effective interventions to the mental health and substance abuse treatment fields. Two principles, science-based practice and stakeholder participation, drive multisite evaluations of behavioral interventions. We examine the roles of these principles in the five programs described in this volume and draw lessons for future studies.