NSF INCLUDES Conference: A Convening on Community-Engaged Assessment

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The conference will be a three-day gathering of national experts and stakeholders in evaluation, research, and design. They will use creative design-thinking processes to rethink assessment approaches aimed at the evaluation of efforts to increase representation in STEM preparation pathways and eventual entry into STEM careers. Broad community-based collaborative change efforts work to benefit a variety of people. However, few initiatives take into account the role of the community and those community stakeholders in the assessment and evaluation process. This lack of representation creates unequal access and control in defining progress and ultimate success. The conference will address this problem by increasing knowledge and understanding of community-engaged assessment. It will re-conceptualize how assessment is conceived and constructed. The people attending (blended expertise of national experts and stakeholders coupled with selected NSF INCLUDES evaluators and PIs) will have deep insight into critical areas including developmental evaluation, collective impact evaluation, culturally relevant evaluation, networked improvement communities, action research, community-based participatory research, appreciative inquiry, organization development, human-centered design, design workshops, and public-interest design-build. They will engage in the real work of what it takes to listen, understand, dream, argue, and create a different way of assessing community collective impact efforts to increase participation of underrepresented groups in STEM. This conference will not only advance knowledge and understanding of community-engaged assessment that supports collective impact but aims to re-conceptualize how assessment in collaborative change initiatives is methodologically constructed: 1) incorporating well qualified and diverse experts (from NSF INCLUDES and beyond) who will facilitate and participate; 2) engaging experts as well as practitioners in design sessions to ideate on "wicked problems" in community-engaged assessment; 3) capturing the ideas, insights, and learnings of the convening in a myriad of ways to be shared across the nation; and 4) leveraging the networks created during the conference to continue the shared learning and work. The results of this convening will support the designing and doing of collaborative change work as well as the development of tools and resources that measure effectiveness of these initiatives. These processes will move this work beyond typical evaluation to an assessment system that engages the broader and deeper community. Publications (both peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed) will create artifacts, including two books written by conference participants, that describe the process so as to encourage and support others to produce coherent and clear visions for implementation and evaluation of complicated collaborative change interventions to increase STEM representation. The results will be especially beneficial to the INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilots.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.