Evaluating University-Based Summer STEM Programs: Challenges, Successes, and Lessons Learned

As interest increases in promoting STEM education in America, summer STEM programs are a promising option for increasing student engagement, interest, and knowledge of STEM. However, STEM programs pose challenges for evaluation, especially programs that serve a large number of students and address a wide range of STEM topics. This paper describes how a team of researchers and practitioners collaborated to design and implement an evaluation of a series of STEM summer programs held at a large, public university. The programs varied in the STEM topics they covered and the age of participants. This created challenges for evaluating a series of programs of such scope and variety. This paper will further describe the programs and the methods used to evaluate them. Illustrative results of the evaluation will be shared, in addition to lessons learned from our evaluation in the hopes that this paper can serve as a resource for those looking for a feasible way to evaluate large, diverse programs.