Evaluation

Besides using the evaluation tools to be developed by the Fund, the Shodor Foundation will undertake an authentic assessment of our computational science education efforts, namely, we will use the same tools, techniques and technologies that we use in carrying out the project to enable its assessment. For instance, each student in SUCCEED will learn to maintain a research notebook, in both hard copy and electronic form. The electronic form of this notebook will be formatted and maintained in HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the operating language of the World Wide Web. Students using the Internet to search and retrieve information will themselves be transformed from consumers of information to producers of information as the Shodor Science Repository is built up with the student project Web pages. Additionally, students will learn to use collaborative software tools to discuss their projects among themselves and with scientists, and these tools themselves are Web-aware. The beauty of this approach is that any parent, teacher, administrator, education researcher or interested participant in any other SSEP program, and any of the staff or officers of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, can be tracking the progress of SUCCEED students on an on-going basis, by watching the project develop on the Web.

We expect to be able to measure an increase in academic performance among SUCCEED participants; while some of the participants are likely to be of high academic standing at the time of their selection, we expect the majority of our students will be of above average performance but with even higher potential. By working with these students to develop their confidence and competence, their academic performance should improve to reflect their true abilities. We will attempt to track all participants for the duration of the program even if they are no longer active in any aspect of SUCCEED.

Our evaluation will be both formative and summative. We have specifically designed SUCCEED to be modular in both time and scope, a design which lends itself to on-going assessment and improvement. In the formative aspects, our own evaluations and information provided by the evaluation activities required by the Fund will be used by the project directors to assess each semester or session and each course, making changes as called for in either recruiting, materials preparation, student advising, and motivation. Student and parent surveys will be conducted, and the scheduled interviews with both students and parents will be used to further identify ways that SUCCEED can meet its own stated goals and the expectations of the participants.

In our summative evaluation, we will also track long range student progress with success, in our view, measured by the number of students who participate in more than one phase of SUCCEED, from the informal activities of the club, through the classes, and the research apprenticeships. We would be happy to realize that we have been successful in "cloning" ourselves, at least to the extent that we will have encouraged a number of students to combine dynamic interests in research and education. If our current experiences scale up the way we expect, SUCCEED participants will become leaders in their schools and community, willingly sharing their expertise for the betterment of others.