Evaluation that grew leadership on four campuses
A shared participatory evaluation across a four-college NSF cohort, built so each institution could see its partnerships, prove its outcomes, and grow its own capacity to lead.
A cohort full of activity, short on comparable evidence.
A four-college NSF cohort was doing real work, each campus building partnerships, courses, and pathways on its own terms. But spread across four very different institutions, that activity was hard to read as one picture. Each campus measured what it could, in its own way, and no one could see the cohort whole or compare what was working.
The deeper risk was capacity. An evaluation that simply audited the grant would satisfy a reporting requirement and leave nothing behind. What these campuses needed was to come out of it more able to lead the next effort themselves.
One participatory framework, built to develop the people inside it.
STEMsaic served as external evaluator across the cohort: Roanoke College, Northwest Arkansas Community College, Albion College, and Canisius University. STEMsaic built one shared framework: structured stakeholder-interview infrastructure, longitudinal outcome tracking, and partnership-network (sociogram) analysis that let each campus see its own ecosystem and the cohort see itself.
The design was participatory on purpose. Evaluation happened with the teams, not to them, so the people running each program built the instincts to ask their own evaluation questions long after the grant. The framework was the deliverable, and so was the leadership it grew.
The best evaluation leaves a team more able to lead than it found them.
Comparable evidence, and campuses ready to lead.
Annual evaluation reporting turned distributed activity into evidence each institution could act on, from course-based undergraduate research results to micro-credential and employer-engagement findings, with partnership networks the campuses could finally see. The cohort became legible to itself and to its funder.
More durable than any single report: leadership and evaluation capacity that stayed on the campuses. That is the model worth carrying forward, a shared, participatory evaluation designed to extend the capacity of the people who own the work.