Stafford Hood - US grants

This workshop is intended to provide a select group of teachers with an increased understanding of program evaluation in general as well as the emerging dicussion about the relevance of culture in program evaluation research and practices. Participants will be provided with an increased awareness of program evaluation, its importance for improving the educational success of minority students in urban school settings, and how program evaluation could be more culturally responsive. The workshop will involve minority and female teachers with 3-5 years experience in culturally diverse classrooms. In addition, teachers will receive 5-8 CE credits for their attendance at the workshop.

The proposed workshop is a follow-up activity to a pilot effort funded by the EHR/REC as a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) in FY 2000 that focused on evaluator capacity building and the importance of cultural context in conducting evaluations. This proposal builds on the strategies and activities implemented in the pilot workshop and will incorporate lessons learned and feedback from the pilot workshop participants.

Major objectives for this workshop would be to provide participants with:
1. an introduction to the role and importance of program evaluation in urban school
settings
2. a general overview of major evaluation theories/approaches that have defined the field
of educational evaluation
3. a closer look at a few emerging evaluation theories/approaches that accept cultural
context as an important factor in program evaluation.
4. preliminary considerations of culturally responsive approaches in the design and
implementation of program evaluations.
5. A videotape and accompanying CD of the workshop will be developed by a professional
media company for use in future professional development workshops and recruitment. The
workshop participants and evaluation facilitators will receive copies of the videotape and
CD.

The overall focus of the project is to develop an empirically-based conceptual framework operationalizing "culturally responsive evaluation", investigating the efficacy and utility of this framework in a professional development workshop of school personnel (principals and teachers), and critiquing the evaluation designs which result from application of the framework. The Relevance of Culture in Evaluation Institute (RCEI) includes a professional development workshop to equip teachers and principals with basic skills in culturally responsive program evaluation and an opportunity to utilize those skills in developing a design for use in their school. The project additionally provides participating schools with four months of technical support by an expert evaluator supporting development of evaluation plans linked to the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Legislation. The RCEI is based on a model developed and implemented by Dr. Stafford Hood (Relevance of Culture in Evaluation Workshop RCEW) and previously funded by NSF. Upon successful completion of this research and development activity, the project will have significantly impacted capacity within the field of evaluation by increasing both the number of evaluators who employ evaluative practices that are culturally responsive, and the number of evaluators of color practicing in the field. The project will also provide beginning validation of a tool for building culturally responsive evaluation capacity.

This project builds on an established need for greater accountability, oversight, and management of public resources and specifically the need for substantive evaluation in educational programs funded by federal agencies in the Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematic (STEM) education disciplines. A particular locus of need for evauluation capacity builing that the project addresses is the need for more culturally diverse and sensitive pool of evaluators. However, the difficulty in building such a pool rests in part of the dearth of graduate training programs in general and of faculty in evaluation from traditionally underrepresented groups in particular. An additional obstacle to such capacity building is the lack of highly dveloped frameworks for curricula, classroom experiences, and internship experiences that are grounded in culturally responsive evaluation. The project proposes to take development of such a framework to higher levels and to produce a model that has potential fo major innovations in how we train and levels and recruit evaluators in graduate degreee and non-degree programs to work effectiveley in cultural settings. The mechanism for this development is a two-phase plan of which the current project is phase one. The first activity in phase on is a two-day workshop to discuss issues, challenges, and strategies for including relevant recruitment and training in culturally responsive evaluation. Participants in the workshop will be representatives from graduate degree and certificate programs who have been successful in their recruitment of and training for culturally repsonsive evaluation. The second activity in the first place is the production of synthesis of information from the activity and a propsal for submission to the National Science Foundation for implementing (and presumably conducting research on) advanced training utilizing the framework. This activity in the new funding would constitute the second phase.

ABSTRACT

Proposal number: 0438482
PI: Stafford Hood
Institution: Arizona State University
Title: Relevance of Culture in Evaluation Institute: Implementing and Empirically Investigating Culturally Responsive Evaluation in Underperforming Schools.

This project is intended to build upon ongoing activities in the Relevance of Culture in Evaluation Institute (Project 0335699) to advance the development of culturally relevant evaluation strategies such as those proposed in the Principal Investigator's co-authored section of the NSF 2002 User-Friendly Handbook for Project Evaluation. By utilizing these strategies in school settings and empirically investigating them the project is intended to develop a model for sustainable change in improving evaluations of programs where cultural context is a salient feature and at the same time broaden the participation of underrepresented groups. The project objectives are: 1) to develop a framework that will operationalize and provide guidance to evaluators seeking to be responsive to cultural context, 2) build capacity within the educational community by increasing the number of evaluators prepared to work in settings where cultural context is an important feature, and 3) build and refine a model of sustainable change and improvement of evaluation for schools that are underperforming.

The Historically Black Colleges and Universities - Undergraduate Program (HBCU-UP) supports conferences that seek to increase the research capacity of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) faculty at HBCUs. The Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment (CREA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign will conduct a preconference professional development workshop and subsequent conference sessions at the 2017 CREA conference, which will directly benefit faculty and administrators at HBCUs. CREA 2017 will be held in Chicago, Illinois from September 27-29, 2017.

The professional development activities are designed to support institutional efforts to strengthen competitiveness for research and evaluation in STEM and promote related institutional capacity in broadening participation research. Selected conference participants will gain access to external evaluation expertise, support in implementing culturally and contextually relevant assessment and evaluation practices on their campuses, and be introduced to faculty and consultants interested in collaborating on future research projects. By providing professional development that builds institutional capacity and expertise within the HBCU community of researchers to conduct culturally responsive evaluations and assessments, this projects contributes significantly to the body of knowledge related to broadening participation and ensures evaluations of projects are rigorous, culturally responsive, and contextually relevant.

Only 5.3% of the faculty at PhD-granting universities are from the following underrepresented communities: Black or African-American, Hispanic, or American Indian/Alaska Native. Diversifying the computing professoriate is critical for providing excellent role models, shaping departmental programs and policies, and bringing diverse perspectives into research projects and programs. The LEAP Alliance aims to increase the diversity of leadership in the computing professoriate by intentionally bringing together four cohorts of universities, each with common strengths and a common agenda. This work builds upon the lessons learned from a first cohort comprised of institutions producing a large percentage of computing faculty and adds three additional cohorts to further strengthen the pipeline to the computing professoriate.

The goal of the LEAP Alliance is to address the broadening participation challenge of increasing the diversity of the future leadership in the computing professoriate at research universities as a way to increase diversity across the field. Key national leadership roles, such as serving on national committees that impact the field of computing, often come from research universities, making these institutions a critical point of focus. The Alliance has previously piloted this effort in an initial cohort of 11 research universities who were found to produce over 50% of the faculty at the top 55 research institutions. They will continue to bring together similar institutions in a second cohort, as well as cohorts that focus on institutions graduate a large percentage of computing PhDs and computing undergraduates, respectively. Ultimately, the Alliance aims to increase the diversity of PhD graduates from the institutions that are the top producers of computing faculty, increase the exposure of academic careers at the institutions that already have good diversity in their PhD graduates, and increase the retention of diverse undergraduate students at the institutions who send students to graduate school that go on to be faculty.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.