Formative Assessment for Evaluation: Collaborative, community-based design of evaluation tools and systems

Abstract

The US National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program provides approximately $64 million dollars in funding each year to improve the education of technicians, through grants given to two-year colleges, industry and academic institutions across a broad range of disciplines in science, technology, engineering, and maths. The program has a twenty year history of collaborative culture and embedded evaluation requirements for grant recipients. Although project efforts happen across many disciplines and types of institutions, the structure of the program means that there are some common threads of activities. The embedded evaluation requirements mean that there are..