đź“Ł Something we’ve been building at MNA is about to go public… soon!
For the past few months, we’ve been working with AAAS CSEW (Center for STEMM Education & Workforce), the S-STEM Resource and Evaluation Center on a white paper about how we evaluate NSF S-STEM projects, the ones that support low-income, academically talented students pursuing STEM degrees.
🔍 The white paper makes a case for Responsive Evaluation Design (RED), an approach that treats context as central rather than as noise to control for. It asks not just “did it work,” but how it worked, for whom, and under what conditions.
🌱 Grounded in Robert Stake’s foundational work and shaped by mixed methods, critical realist, and participatory traditions, RED is built for the kind of complexity that S-STEM projects actually live in: financial pressures, caregiving, transfer pathways, mentoring, and everything else that a single metric can’t capture. We also walk through how RED complements more familiar frameworks, logic models, the CDC framework, and Kirkpatrick, so it’s not an either/or proposition.
đź“… Dropping September 29. More soon! Watch this space.
