The Iowa STEM Education Evaluation (I-SEE): Navigating the Iowa Roadmap is a Research, Evaluation and Technical Assistance (RETA) project focused on research on state plans for STEM education. It is seated strategically within the Iowa STEM Education Roadmap, which is led by the Governor's Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Advisory Council, set in place through Executive Order Number Seventy-Four. The I-SEE is building a coordinated statewide evaluation system that comprehensively assesses the educational and economic changes that occur throughout a long-term statewide STEM initiative. The I-SEE project objectives are to: 1) generate best practices in developing and implementing evaluative strategies to examine statewide STEM initiatives, as well as translating and disseminating evaluation and research findings to support the improvement of a state plan to advance K-12 STEM education; 2) identify, develop and sustain evaluative capacity and infrastructure that emphasizes accessible and useful resources, especially those that are online; and 3) create a system to examine statewide cultural change related to STEM, particularly in terms of public awareness of and support for STEM education and workforce/economic development initiatives. These objectives are obtained through implementation of four major strategic components: Web-Based Portals, Process Evaluation, Survey of Iowans, and Asset Identification. Major players in this effort are the Iowa Mathematics and Science Education Partnership housed at the University of Northern Iowa (UNI), the UNI Center for Social and Behavioral Research, the Research Institute for Studies in Education at Iowa State University (ISU), and the University of Iowa (UI) Center for Evaluation and Assessment. The project team conducts research to strategically disseminate to other states what is learned about facilitating conditions and barriers critical to advancing a statewide STEM K-12 education plan for all learners, educators, and families.
