Maximizing the Impact of the NASA Innovations in Climate Education (NICE) Project: Building a Community of Project Evaluators, Collaborating Across Agencies & Evaluating a 71-Project Portfolio

Ann Martin, Lin Chambers, Margaret Pippin, & Kate Spruill, NASA The NASA Innovations in Climate Education (NICE) project at Langley Research Center in Hampton, VA, has funded 71 climate education initiatives since 2008. An evaluator was added to the team in mid-2011 to undertake an evaluation of the portfolio. The funded initiatives span across the nation and contribute to the development of a climate-literate public and the preparation of a climate-related STEM workforce through research experiences, professional development opportunities, development of data access and modeling tools, and educational opportunities in both K-12 and higher education. The portfolio of projects also represents a wide range of evaluation questions, approaches, and methodologies. The evaluation of the NICE portfolio has encountered context-specific challenges, including the breadth of the portfolio, the need to build up capacity for electronic project monitoring, and government-wide initiatives to align evaluations across Federal agencies. Additionally, we have contended with the difficulties of maintaining compliance with the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA), which constrains the ability of NICE to gather data and approach interesting evaluative questions. We will discuss these challenges and our approaches to overcoming them. First, we have committed to fostering communication and partnerships among our awardees and evaluators, facilitating the sharing of expertise, resources, lessons learned and practices across the individual project evaluations. Additionally, NICE has worked in collaboration with NOAA's Environmental Literacy Grants (ELG) and NSF's Climate Change Education Partnerships (CCEP) programs to foster synergy, leverage resources, and facilitate communication. NICE projects, and their evaluators, have had the opportunity to work with and benefit from colleagues on projects funded by other agencies, and to orient their work within the context of the broader tri-agency goals and efforts. Further work is underway to coordinate a common evaluation framework across the tri-agency portfolio. The tri-agency partnership has also focused on responding to calls for cross-agency interaction and common evaluation (e.g., the recommendations of the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Committee on STEM Education). This integrated, collaborative approach to the project and its evaluation aims to increase the impact of the NICE initiative while also creating pathways to and resources for measuring that impact. In this poster, we will outline the NICE project and its portfolio of funded projects, along with our approach to building collaborations and relationships to build and support a community of practice among climate change educators and evaluators. We will describe how the activities of the NICE team and participation in the tri-agency collaboration contribute to NICE's goals, and will share how we leverage these elements for use in evaluation of the portfolio. This poster will have particular relevance to educators and evaluators on Federally-funded STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education projects, and will provide insights to the evaluation landscape on the project level at one Federal agency.