Evaluation and assessment are critical components of any program, but it is often challenging to have time, funding, and staff expertise to engage in high-quality evaluation and assessment activities. The following resources include user-friendly instruments, websites, and evaluation guides to help girl-serving STEM programs effectively evaluate and assess their efforts.
Assessment Tools in Informal Science
This searchable collection of assessment tools for informal science learning provides practitioners, evaluators, researchers, and policy makers with the necessary information to choose appropriate tools for assessing program quality and outcomes for children and youth.
Harvard Family Research Project
The Harvard Family Research Project provides a variety of evaluation-related publications and resources, including The Evaluation Exchange, a one-of-a-kind periodical that contains new lessons and emerging strategies for evaluating programs and policies, particularly those focused on children, families, and communities.
InformalScience.org Website
This website includes a collection of evaluation resources related to informal science, including evaluation publications, online evaluation sources, how-to manuals, and evaluation reports that projects have shared.
National Science Foundation Framework for Evaluating Impacts of Informal Science Education Projects
This book introduces a framework for evaluating the impacts of informal science education projects, including guidance on measuring specific STEM-related impact categories (knowledge, attitudes, behavior) and project types (exhibitions, mass media, youth and community programs and collaborations).
National Science Foundation 2010 User-Friendly Handbook for Project Evaluation
This handbook is aimed at people who need to learn more about both what evaluation can do and how to do an evaluation, including overviews of evaluation types, steps in doing an evaluation, quantitative and qualitative data collection, and culturally responsive evaluation strategies.
Online Evaluation Research Library
This National Science Foundation-supported website provides a large collection of sound plans, reports, and instruments from past and current project evaluations in several content areas and guidelines for how to improve evaluation practice using the Web site resources.
The Field-tested Learning Assessment Guide (FLAG)
This online collection of STEM-related assessment tools is designed primarily for classroom STEM instructors, but also relevant for informal STEM educators. Assessment tools are sorted by discipline, purpose, and technique.