Strengthening Informal CS Education Program Delivery through Evaluation Capacity Building (Abstract Only)

With the growth of informal and out of school educational focus on increasing female participation in CS, many of us are asking critical questions about program development, participant learning, and program impact. Which programs are having success reaching and encouraging girls to pursue computer science? What stumbling blocks are encountered? How successfully are programs engaging girls with different STEM orientations or different racial/ethnic/economic backgrounds? How successful are existing CS programs in pivoting to be more accessible to females? Many nonprofit organizations cannot effectively answer these questions because they lack the capacity for program evaluation. Some organizations delay putting evaluation into place, or use a one-dimensional evaluation approach (i.e., a single survey) even though ongoing and comprehensive evaluation results are crucial to program success. Building internal evaluation capacity can help organizations meet their most critical evaluation needs and build systems of continuous improvement. This BOF session will engage participants in discussing their challenges in designing and implementing program evaluations. Participants will have the opportunity to share strategies, evaluative resources, and challenges in building evaluative capacity and conducting effective evaluations. Discussion leaders will share resources developed as part of an evaluation capacity building initiative with informal CS education programs--CS Outreach Program Evaluation Network (CS OPEN--a collaboration between the National Girls Collaborative and Google). As an outcome of this BOF discussion, we hope to collectively identify some lessons learned and next steps for building evaluative capacity around informal CS education.