🎉 It’s here, six days ahead of schedule!🎈
📄 “Responsive Evaluation Design (RED): A Framework for Evaluating NSF S-STEM Projects” is now live through the AAAS CSEW (Center for STEMM Education & Workforce) S-STEM Resource and Evaluation Center, funded through the National Science Foundation (NSF)!
✍️ We wrote this for anyone who designs, implements, funds, or evaluates #SSTEM projects: PIs, evaluators, and program officers alike. The white paper walks through RED’s core principles, situates it alongside frameworks like logic models/theories of change, the CDC framework, Kirkpatrick, and Utilization-Focused Evaluation, and shows how each can be strengthened through a responsive lens.
🎨 The white paper is also just beautiful to look at. It’s full of clean visual breakdowns: a comparative table of philosophical traditions, a color-coded NSF S-STEM logic model sample mapping inputs through long-term impact, and a side-by-side of assessment vs. evaluation that makes a subtle distinction immediately clear.
📚 And it’s grounded, not abstract. The “RED in Action” section walks through four illustrative scenarios across biology, computer science, physics, and a multidisciplinary math/tech context, each one showing a moment where listening to stakeholders surfaced something a standard pre/post survey would have missed entirely: hidden isolation in a summer research program, a communication gap between scholars and industry mentors, a belonging survey that hid who was quietly leaving.
💡 The throughline: evaluation should be less about compliance and more about learning, sharing, and engaging, especially when the students/scholars you’re serving are navigating barriers that no fixed metric fully captures.
🔗 Read it here: https://sstemrec.aaas.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/S-STEM-REC_2026_RED-WhitePaper_Final_508.pdf
