Resources

The YouthLearn Initiative has outline some action steps to help you plan a successful and effective youth program. Whether you're offering an in-school or out-of-school program, good planning is very often the key to success. You may find that you have the time and resources to do some of these action steps while others may be beyond the scope of your current priorities or capacity. Just remember, it's never too late to embark on a particular phase of planning, even after a program has launched.

The projects described in this booklet represent the work that has been funded by the Informal Science Education program at the National Science Foundation. The outcomes of these projects have provided a wide range of opportunities for students, teachers, and the general public to become more familiar and interested in learning about science. Just a few of the impacts that have come about as a result of this work are:Wired to Win is expected to reach between 8 to 10 million viewers over a 5 year distribution period. In Boston alone, over 68,000 individuals have seen the film.Terrascope Youth

This report from the Exploratorium's Learning and Youth Research and Evaluation Center (LYREC) highlights trends, questions, and findings related to out-of-school-time science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (OST STEM) programs by drawing on the efforts of some two dozen federally funded programs that participated and presented their work at a conference held in Washington, DC in October of 2009.

ITEST LRC Idea Brief Volume 1, June 2005This Idea Brief shares tips and tricks from four different ITEST projects around planning and implementing summer programs.

In this report, Inverness Research summarizes their findings based on evaluating the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH)'s high school program over 10 years. The report includes:A discussion of the theory of action and the rationale that underlies the AMNH youth programsA description of three of the programs that have been offered and the evolution in program design that has taken place over the yearsA description of the core common features of the programs

ITEST LRC Data Brief Volume 1, Issue 2This Data Brief explores findings reported in the 2011-2012 Management Information System (MIS). In this edition we focus on the topic of validated instruments, by analyzing information reported by the projects regarding their use of instruments to measure youth and teacher outcomes, their research questions and their evaluation questions. The MIS asked project Principal Investigators (PIs) whether or not they use externally developed and validated instruments to measure youth or teacher outcomes. For those projects using external instruments, the MIS

In today's world of high accountability, strong evidence on intended outcomes is key to building credibility and replicability of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) programs. This primer, for program directors/managers, educators and others responsible for developing and implementing STEM programs: Provides evaluation guidelines and resources for program leaders who are implementing STEM programs in schools and community-based organizations. Reduces "evaluation anxiety" for individuals who are not professional evaluators by providing guidelines for good evaluation

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.

Produced by the Association for the Study and Development of Community (ASDC) for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, this document offers an orientation to handbooks and basic primers on evaluation. These resources are designed to meet the needs of the non-expert, explaining some of the central issues in evaluation and why they are important. The Guide itself helps organizations to assess which evaluation primer might be most useful for their needs and what to expect, in terms of information, from each.

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.