The STEM Research Center offers consultation, internal and external evaluation, and research support for grants and programs with a learning or community engagement component. As researchers, evaluators, and principal investigators who focus solely on STEM education, our expertise is grounded in theory and practice. Specifically:

• Evaluation and applied research services, i.e. providing external or internal evaluation of projects:
• Needs assessment or front-end evaluation (referred to as marketing in commercial contexts): We can study potential audiences and their needs, prior knowledge, interests and behaviors to inform project design and to question and clarify assumptions about a project’s need within stakeholder communities.
• Formative evaluation: Working closely with our partners, we use empirical evidence to help improve project outcomes and inform processes for continued improvement.
• Summative evaluation: We conduct outcome or impact focused evaluation to document project achievements and success, provide critical feedback, or serve as a means for external accountability.
• Applied research: Where appropriate, our researchers can join project teams as co-principal investigators and serve as research partners.
• Advisory board facilitation-specifically to support integration of evaluation findings.
• Theory of change and logic model development: Many projects can benefit from a clear articulation on how and why a particular approach is likely to be successful, based on insights from prior research, or based on a logically developed structure on how project inputs and project activities can impact various audiences. The Center has extensive experience developing logic or program models and their close counterparts, theories of change.

Our projects generally consist of implementation of multi-year, multi-site evaluations on local, state, and national levels, but also ask us about smaller-scale projects such as individual training events. We can serve as external evaluators on OSU-led projects or serve in more embedded roles to more strongly support project development. Note that the STEM Research Center is located within the Division of Research and Innovation and fully independent of any of OSU’s colleges or its extension and engagement divisions.