Current Evaluation
National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT)
The Center for Workforce Development is performing both a formative and summative evaluation of NCWIT. NCWIT has a three pronged strategy to achieve its mission:
- build a national community of practitioners
- broaden the conversation
- target key policies and opportunities
The two main evaluative components are the development and collection of NCWIT success metrics, and an organizational effectiveness evaluation. The evaluation team analyzes the leadership team, the Alliances, and the Social Science Advisory Board in terms of collaboration, community building and effectiveness in accomplishing organizational strategies.
The major question CWD examines: Is NCWIT accomplishing their goals through building a national infrastructure and driving the utilization of that infrastructure?
National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) Extension Services
The Center for Workforce Development (CWD) at the University of Washington will provide a formative evaluation of the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) Extension Services program. The goal of the Extension Services is to mobilize the implementation of effective practices to increase the numbers of women involved in computing. Site visits to departments implementing systemic change and outreach/dissemination workshops will be the focal points of this evaluation. CWD will work with co-PIs Joanne Cohoon and Lecia Barker to develop the structure and instruments for the assessment.
CWD participates in the NSF-funded Northwest Engineering Talent Expansion Partnership, a joint effort to increase the number of underrepresented minorities and women in engineering. NW-ETEP is composed of Washington State community colleges and universities offering engineering and preparatory degrees, as well as organizations within these institutions that are concerned with diversifying the STEM workforce. The primary goal of NW-ETEP is to promote the participation and retention of underrepresented groups in engineering programs in Washington State. CWD is the internal evaluater of the NW-ETEP grant, assessing NW-ETEP activities at eight post-secondary institutions.
Center for Institutional Change, ADVANCE Institutional Transformation
With a National Science Foundation ADVANCE Institutional Transformation Award, the University of Washington created the Center for Institutional Change (CIC) to help transform the culture at the UW. The aim of ADVANCE is to increase the participation of women in science and engineering.
The UW ADVANCE project was designed to build upon existing strengths at the university while serving as the catalyst for institutional transformation. The CIC focuses on the implementation of programs designed to eliminate existing barriers to women and to precipitate cultural change at both the departmental and the institutional level. The UW ADVANCE Center for Institutional Change has six major components:
- Leadership development for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) chairs and deans
- Department cultural change
- Examination of UW policies for equity and policy transformation
- Mentoring women in STEM for leadership
- Visiting scholars who can contribute to the goals of the project
- Transitional support for female faculty members in STEM departments
The Center for Workforce Development serves as the internal evaluator for the ADVANCE grant and manages a faculty and graduate student mentoring program for the CIC. CWD also coordinates the external evaluation process led by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Strategic Education Centers (SEC)
Strategic Education Centers aims to empower youth in Swaziland by providing health education, student exchange opportunities, and technology and academic training. In addition to the prevention of HIV/AIDS, which is widespread in Swaziland, SEC aims to give adolescent boys and girls the knowledge to pursue higher education in technological fields, and subsequent employment in thriving fields. Originally intended for girls, the program will soon be expanded to include boys.
CWD, in conjunction with the UW Center for Health Research and Education (CHER), monitors and evaluates the success of each cohort of students participating in the SEC program. CWD’s formative evaluation constitutes an improvement of SEC’s previous monitoring and evaluation techniques, and will allow SEC to document the changes in student behaviors, attitudes, and knowledge of HIV/AIDS prevention.
Translation Technology for Language Modeling, Information Technology Research (ITR)
Dr. Mari Ostendorf, a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington, is the Principal Investigator on this NSF funded project. The goal of the Translation Technology for Language Modeling (TTLM) project is to integrate machine translation and speech recognition language modeling techniques to develop a new source of data for learning structure in language. The model will be investigated for potential use in bilingual K-12 education. The University of Washington and the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California are collaborators on the project.
The Center for Workforce Development has been contracted to manage three elements of the outreach component for the grant:
- Student Training and Mentoring: CWD’s award-winning mentoring program will be used at both institutions to develop mentoring programs for graduate students affiliated with the TTLM research project. CWD will track the students in the program over the duration of the project, to assess the opportunity to participate in the mentoring program and its impact on retention and advancement of all student participants and to assess the students’ perception of their satisfaction with their technical work on the grant. Special attention to diversity will be given with respect to gender and ethnicity.
- Pilot project evaluation: CWD will conduct a formative assessment of the pilot project investigating language technology for bilingual education. This will include a formative evaluation of the pilot project with elementary schools focusing on bilingual education. It will include an assessment of student and teacher experiences testing the new language tool. The first two years would involve assessing communication between elementary school teachers and researchers, and the second two years will involve assessing classroom activities.