STEM Education & Training TIG Week: Soaring Together – Navigating STEM Program Evaluation and Community by Ciara C. Knight and Rajiv Ramdat

Date: Friday, April 4, 2025

Welcome all! This is Dr. Ciara C. Knight, a Black Senior Evaluation Officer at Sankofa Consulting, and Rajiv Ramdat, a gay, first-generation American, instructor, and a leadership / academic life coach. We are both STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics) education evaluation experts, both with formal STEM training with advanced degrees, with a deep commitment to advancing equity in the evaluation field.

Building connections is key to the Culturally Responsive and Equitable Evaluation (CREE) principle in developing career pathways for emergent evaluators in STEM Education and Training initiatives. Diversifying STEM fields requires not only increasing the number of diverse evaluators but also fostering meaningful relationships that support their growth through mentorship, especially when mentors share similar cultural backgrounds and values. Connection is more important now than ever, given the current hostile sociopolitical environment in the United States. In such times, strong, supportive relationships are essential for resilience and success, helping to create a foundation of trust and inclusion that empowers emergent evaluators to thrive despite external challenges.

Before mentorship can take place, however, emergent STEM evaluators need more opportunities to connect with experienced evaluators and learn from their insights. At the 2024 AEA conference in Portland, we hosted a Birds of a Feather session to facilitate connections between emergent and experienced STEM evaluators. In addition to learning about the personal and professional journeys of these evaluators, the session provided valuable tips, resources, and mentorship opportunities aimed at equipping new evaluators with the skills and confidence needed to assess STEM initiatives.

Cool Tips

• Build Community: Networking is not just about expanding your client list; it’s about creating a supportive community that helps you navigate challenges and provides opportunities to give back.
• Resilience is Proactive: Resilience is not just a reaction to adversity; it’s a mindset and process that you cultivate in advance to better handle challenges when they arise.
• Use Mixed Methods: Whenever possible, combine quantitative and qualitative methods. Contextualized data helps broaden our understanding of communities, individuals, situations, and policies.
• Stay Informed: Subscribe to STEM newsletters to keep up with the latest trends and developments in the field.
• Get Involved: Serve on STEM review panels for grants, conferences, or manuscripts. Join an AEA Topical Interest Group or your local AEA affiliate. These are great ways to connect with STEM evaluators while contributing to the field and increasing your skills.

Rad Resources

• Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment 
• Community Tool Box
• Equitable Evaluation Initiative
• Expanding the Bench
• Racial Equity Tools
• Indigenous Evaluation Toolkit Prepared by Seven Directions
• We All Count
• AEA Graduate Education Diversity Internship (GEDI)
• Data Visualization Academy  
• EvaluATE
• Evaluation Capacity Case Challenge
• Practical Evaluation Training
• Program Evaluation Checklists 
• Program Evaluation Research Guide
• R for the Rest of Us
• University of Kansas Community Tool Box
• AEA Summer Institute

The American Evaluation Association is hosting Extension Education Evaluation TIG Week with our colleagues in the STEM Education & Training Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our STEM Education & Training TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.