Webinar Recording Posted on STEM Identity, Interest, and Engagement

Thank you to everyone who attended our recent webinar on defining and measuring STEM interest, identity, and engagement!

We hope that it exposed you to new perspectives on these concepts and inspired you to explore new approaches and tools for your informal STEM education work.

Watch the recording below and download the presentation slides.

More about the Webinar

Speakers included the following members of the CAISE Evaluation and Measurement Task Force, as well as CAISE Project Director and Principal Investigator Jamie Bell:

• Mac Cannady, The Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California, Berkeley
• Kevin Crowley, University of Pittsburgh, and co-Principal Investigator, CAISE
• Amy Grack Nelson, Science Museum of Minnesota
• Kelly Riedinger, Center for Research on Lifelong STEM Learning, Oregon State University​

The content was based on a series of interviews with 35 scholars on how they define and measure STEM identity, interest, and engagement. Our interviewees were diverse and included STEM education researchers, science communication scholars, social psychologists, learning scientists, and informal science educators.

If you’d like to jump to a particular section in the webinar, here’s a guide:

1. Jamie’s summary of CAISE’s history in evaluation (4:00)
2. Kelly’s description of the task force process and resources (8:05)
3. Amy’s introduction to the concepts of identity, interest, and engagement (11:55)
4. Mac, Kevin, Amy, and Kelly highlight the perspectives from the interviews that they found most striking (23:15)
5. Audience questions (39:45)
   • Finding the right measurement tool
   • How professional evaluators might use these resources
   • Capturing longitudinal outcomes
   • STEM and science as a whole vs. discipline-specific measures
   • The relationship between constructs

Other Evaluation-Related Resources

More than 350 people attended the live webinar, and more than 600 registered, so we know this topic is of great interest to the field! Here are some additional resources you might find helpful:

• CAISE’s “Design Evaluation” webpages, which include tips on working with an evaluator and a round-up of evaluation tools and instruments.
• A recent issue of New Directions for Evaluation, one of the American Evaluation Association’s journals, focused on evaluation in informal STEM education. Topics include direct and unobtrusive measures, shared measures for evaluation common outcomes, equity and evaluation, evaluation capacity building, and future directions. It’s free to access.
• An upcoming session at the Association of Science-Technology Center’s annual conference in Toronto, on Saturday, September 21.

Please let us know if there are other ways that CAISE can help you better understand or keep up with the ever-evolving conversation around evaluation.