All Projects

The evaluation team partnered with City of Hope to examine the effects of their Community Teaching Laboratory program. This program aims to offer students laboratory experiences in the biotech area and involve them in ongoing cancer research. As part of the evaluation, the team worked closely with City of Hope to develop tracking mechanisms and assessments to understand the impact that the program has on students.

The evaluation of UCI's Diverse Educational Community and Doctoral Experience: Partnering in Leadership for Undergraduate Students (DECADE PLUS) program aimed to understand the effects of mentoring from graduate leadership coaches and undergraduate peer mentors on academic performance and leadership development. The DECADE PLUS program evaluation utilized a Randomized Control Trial (RCT) to assign students to treatment and control conditions. The research design also utilized an embedded mixed methods component that included multiple interviews and focus groups, to understand student experiences. This evaluation has significant policy and theoretical implications since it represents one of the few RCT studies to examine first-year experience programs.

International Baccalaureate (IB) is an organization that offers schools a curriculum that is focused on developing students’ critical thinking skills through inquiry based instruction. The IB program is applied globally with over 4,000 participating schools. After modifying their Middle Years program (this program is implemented in 5-8 grades), the evaluation team conducted a multi-year formative and summative evaluation examining the implementation and impacts of this recent reform. This is the largest evaluation project that the IB has ever commissioned, and the formative results from various surveys (approximately 40,000 students, 8,000 teachers), interviews, and 40+ case studies have led to multiple program and policy level changes at the IB, specifically around teacher professional development and curriculum development. This evaluation project is also intended to build their evaluation capacity and will inform their research and evaluation policy agenda for the coming decade.

The Evaluation of UCR's Plant 3D (Discover, Design & Deploy) uses a mixed methods approach to understand the impacts of this program, which aims to develop and disseminate a model pipeline for recruitment and preparation of diverse PhD and MS trainees for careers in ag/biotechnology, academia and government.

This program is a first-year experience program designed to increase the retention rates of undergraduate students at UC Riverside. Evaluation of the program utilized Randomized Control Trial (RCT) to assign students to treatment and control conditions. In addition, the research design included multiple interviews with students and faculty and the tracking of students who dropped out to determine the reasons why. This evaluation has significant policy and theoretical implications since it represents one of the few RCT studies to examine first-year experience programs.

Girl's Inc is a pregnancy prevention program for high school-aged participants. The program provides age-appropriate, medically accurate information intended to postpone sexual activity and promote effective protection against pregnancy and sexual transmitted diseases. A randomized control trial was implemented to understand the impacts of the Girl's Inc. curriculum on pregnancy and health related outcomes.

URBAN is an innovative Biogeoscience and Environmental Health program designed to prepare Ph.D. trainees for academia, government agencies, NGOs, and the private sector. This multi-year evaluation utilizes a collaborative developmental approach to understand programmatic outcomes and provide feedback for program improvement in addition to funder reporting.