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National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Engineering Research Centers (ERC) must complement their technical research with various education and outreach opportunities to: 1) improve and promote engineering education, both within the center and to the local community; 2) encourage and include the underrepresented populations to participate in Engineering activities; and 3) advocate communication and collaboration between industry and academia. ERCs ought to perform an adequate evaluation of their educational and outreach programs to ensure that beneficial goals are met. Each ERC has complete autonomy in conducting and reporting such evaluation. Evaluation tools used by individual ERCs are quite similar, but each ERC has designed their evaluation processes in isolation, including evaluation tools such as survey instruments, interview protocols, focus group protocols, and/or observation protocols. These isolated efforts resulted in redundant resources spent and lacking outcome comparability across ERCs. Leaders from three different ERCs led and initiated a collaborative effort to address the above issue by building a suite of common evaluation instruments that all current and future ERCs can use. This leading group consists of education directors and external evaluators from all three partners ERCs and engineering education researchers, who have worked together for two years. The project intends to address the four ERC program clusters: Broadening Participation in Engineering, Centers and Networks, Engineering Education, and Engineering Workforce Development. The instruments developed will pay attention to culture of inclusion, outreach activities, mentoring experience, and sustained interest in engineering. The project will deliver best practices in education program evaluation, which will not only support existing ERCs, but will also serve as immediate tools for brand new ERCs and similar large-scale research centers. Expanding the research beyond TEEC and sharing the developed instruments with NSF as well as other ERCs will also promote and encourage continual cross-ERC collaboration and research. Further, the joint evaluation will increase the evaluation consistency across all ERC education programs. Embedded instrumental feedback loops will lead to continual improvement to ERC education performance and support the growth of an inclusive and innovative engineering workforce. Four major deliveries are planned. First, develop a common quantitative assessment instrument, named Multi-ERC Instrument Inventory (MERCII). Second, develop a set of qualitative instruments to complement MERCII. Third, create a web-based evaluation platform for MERCII. Fourth, update the NSF ERC education program evaluation best practice manual. These deliveries together will become part of and supplemented by an ERC evaluator toolbox. This project strives to significantly impact how ERCs evaluate their educational and outreach programs. Single ERC based studies lack the sample size to truly test the validity of any evaluation instruments or measures. A common suite of instruments across ERCs would provide an opportunity for a large scale assessment study. The online platform will further provide an easy-to-use tool for all ERCs to facilitate evaluation, share data, and reporting impacts. 

Due to the COVID-19 crisis preventing face-to-face interaction, three National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded centers employed a virtual/remote format for their summer Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) Programs, reaching K-12 STEM teachers across the country. Teachers participated virtually from four different states by joining engineering research teams from four different universities in three different RET programs. Lab experiences depended on the nature of the research and institution-specific guidelines for in-lab efforts, resulting in some teachers conducting lab experiments with materials sent directly to their homes, some completing their experience fully online, and some completing portions of lab work in person on campus. Each teacher developed an engineering lesson plan based on the corresponding center’s research to be implemented either in person or virtually during the 2020-2021 academic school year. Research posters, created with support from graduate student and faculty mentors, were presented to industry partners, education partners, center members, and the NSF. Support for the teachers as they implement lessons, present posters, and disseminate their developed curricula, has continued throughout the year. Common survey and interview/focus group protocols, previously designed specifically for measuring the impact of engineering education programs, were adapted and used to separately evaluate each of the three virtual programs. Strengths and suggested areas of improvement will be explored and discussed to inform future use of the common evaluation instruments. Additionally, preliminary results, highlighting general successes and challenges of shifting RET programming to a virtual/remote format across the three centers, will be discussed.