Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) Evaluation Capacity Building Conferences (AGEP ECBCs)

Education Development Center, Waltham MA

Investigators

Abstract

The Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) Evaluation Capacity Building Conferences (AGEP ECBCs) project was created in response to the NSF's Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program solicitation (NSF 16-552). The AGEP program solicitation calls for conference that are related to the AGEP program goal and objectives. The AGEP program seeks to advance knowledge about models to improve pathways to the professoriate and the successes of URM graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty in specific STEM disciplines and/or STEM education research fields. AGEP Alliance awardees develop, implement and study, via integrated educational and social science research, Alliance Models to transform the dissertator phase of doctoral education, postdoctoral training and/or faculty advancement, and the transitions within and across the pathway levels, of historically underrepresented minorities (URMs) in STEM and STEM education faculty careers. As the nation addresses a STEM achievement gap between URM and non-URM undergraduate and graduate students, our universities and colleges struggle to recruit, retain and promote URM STEM faculty who serve as role models and academic leaders for URM students to learn from, work with and emulate. Recent NSF reports indicate that URM STEM associate and full professors occupy 8% of these senior faculty positions at all 4-year colleges and universities, and about 6% of these positions at the nation's most research-intensive institutions. This AGEP ECBCs project will advance knowledge about the evaluation of initiatives, models and alliance activities that can be sustained, institutionalized and scaled at US universities and colleges to advance URM graduate students, postdoctoral scholars and faculty in STEM and STEM education academic professions. The goal of the AGEP ECBCs project is to increase the capacity of evaluators, who work with AGEP-funded Alliances and other awards, to produce high quality, culturally responsive, contextually relevant, and methodologically appropriate evaluations of award activities, outcomes and impacts. The conference series will generate and support a collaborative network of AGEP project evaluators, investigators, staff, graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. In addition to two conferences per year, there will be webinars and other web-based support systems for the network of evaluators, Principal Investigators and project team members. One conference per year will be a pre-conference workshop at the American Evaluation Association's (AEA) annual meeting, and the other conference will be a pre-conference training at the Annual AGEP Research Conference. The AGEP ECBCs project includes both evaluation components and a dissemination plan for broader impacts. 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.