GSE/COM: Increasing Assessment Capacity in Engineering Outreach (SWE AWE)

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This outreach and communication project aims to institutionalize a highly successful assessment project, the AWE (Assessing Women and Men in Engineering) Project (NSF HRD #0120642) within the Society of Women Engineers (SWE). The SWE AWE project aims to 1) further build assessment capacity in the engineering outreach community; 2) enhance and disseminate the comprehensive set of AWE assessment tools to a broader audience; and 3) provide a sustainable and highly visible home for the AWE Project. The SWE AWE Project will reach an outreach audience beyond the scope of the original AWE Project, with an emphasis on increasing usage among organizations offering pre-college recruitment programs. The SWE AWE Project will reach SWE''s membership and other professional organizations and corporations with established relationships to SWE that offer engineering outreach activities. The AWE project web site will move to SWE.org (the official SWE website) with enhanced and updated materials to make them more valuable to audiences beyond academe, and create and offer a series of workshops leveraged through existing SWE activities (e.g. national conferences) and partnerships designed to reach all organizations, corporations and academic institutions that provide engineering outreach activities. Intellectual Merit--This project will facilitate the broad dissemination of a unique set of tools to build assessment capacity among volunteers and professionals who develop and implement engineering outreach activities through institutions, organizations and corporations. It will also benefit researchers by increasing their ability to collect and access metadata on women''s participation in engineering and build capacity to provide a national data set on the effectiveness of outreach activities. This will ultimately allow funding organizations to have access to comparable data for their funded work, thus informing future funding decisions. Broader Impact--The SWE AWE Project addresses real world problems in implementing reliable and valid assessments by providing a sustainable home and a means to disseminate the AWE tools to a broader audience and prevents these tools from becoming unsupportable and unusable. Increased dissemination of these assessment instruments will provide sound data that can be compared across a number of institutions nationwide. The SWE AWE Project will ensure that engineering outreach program activities have access to assessment and capacity building resources. At a national level, the data collected from SWE AWE instruments and use of SWE AWE capacity building tools will provide a sound base for understanding national trends in engineering outreach activities, participant attitudes, and other critical factors to understanding and impacting the participation of girls and women in engineering.