Hello! I am Melissa Page, an evaluator with The Evaluation Group, and the incoming STEM TIG Social Chair. I am excited to bring to the forefront again our STEM TIG Repository as well as several other websites that offer surveys that may meet your STEM needs.
No one should reinvent the wheel when searching for the right instrument to measure outcomes. The STEM Repository grew from a working session at AEA and was officially launched in this previous blog post. The ORAU website houses the repository and offers a downloadable spreadsheet and resources to add new surveys to the repository. This is where YOU come in to help crowdsource and add new surveys to the list.
With the increased STEM focus in computer science and computational thinking, I noticed that the repository lacks many of the current surveys that are being used to measure student attitudes, skills, and use of coding and computational thinking. The lack of computer science, coding, and computational thinking surveys is easy to identify, but what else is missing from our resources? Please take a few minutes to share your resources with the STEM field and all AEA evaluators. This collaborative effort embodies the spirit of collaborative and participatory evaluation, and it is what makes our efforts as evaluators stronger.
Rad Resources
STELAR: STEM Learning and Resource Center offers project specific instruments from the ITEST (Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers) projects. The search feature includes by resource type, discipline, or topic. Even if some of the same surveys are included in other repositories, the context provided by each ITEST project may overlap with your same population, age group, or geographic area. Reaching out to the ITEST staff could provide you with reliability and validity data with the study population to determine feasibility within your own study population.
PEARINC: Partnerships in Education and Resilience offers access to instruments and publications. A review of informal science instruments can be searched by age, domain, assessment type, or custom criteria. In addition to accessing instruments, you can also rate the utility of the instrument and leave comments. We can all benefit from sharing our successes and challenges for the entire evaluation community. I know I personally read reviews before purchasing a product; similarly, we want to know from others’ experiences if an instrument met the criteria, goal, objective, or outcome intended in its use.
Cornell Citizen Science: A list of available instruments, developed from an NSF DEVISE grant, can be found here to be requested for download and use for adult or student STEM interest, skills, or motivation. The scales can be requested as is or customized to your project. The results of your utilization will be added to the research base of others that have used the instrument.
The Friday Institute: Another list of STEM instruments that can be requested to download include the student S-STEM that measures student math, science, engineering, 21st century skills, and career interest as well as the T-STEM to measure science, math, or engineering teachers attitudes and beliefs.
National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics: This government website offers surveys for research and higher education in STEM fields.
Next time you need to identify a STEM construct or outcome, check out these resources to see if the instrument you desire is at the ready. If it is not there, and you find a worthy instrument, please take a few minutes to add to the STEM Repository. We can all contribute to excellent research and evaluation for the STEM field.
The American Evaluation Association is hosting STEM Education and Training TIG Week with our colleagues in the STEM Education and Training Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our STEM TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.