This project builds on an established need for greater accountability, oversight, and management of public resources and specifically the need for substantive evaluation in educational programs funded by federal agencies in the Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematic (STEM) education disciplines. A particular locus of need for evauluation capacity builing that the project addresses is the need for more culturally diverse and sensitive pool of evaluators. However, the difficulty in building such a pool rests in part of the dearth of graduate training programs in general and of faculty in evaluation from traditionally underrepresented groups in particular. An additional obstacle to such capacity building is the lack of highly dveloped frameworks for curricula, classroom experiences, and internship experiences that are grounded in culturally responsive evaluation. The project proposes to take development of such a framework to higher levels and to produce a model that has potential fo major innovations in how we train and levels and recruit evaluators in graduate degreee and non-degree programs to work effectiveley in cultural settings. The mechanism for this development is a two-phase plan of which the current project is phase one. The first activity in phase on is a two-day workshop to discuss issues, challenges, and strategies for including relevant recruitment and training in culturally responsive evaluation. Participants in the workshop will be representatives from graduate degree and certificate programs who have been successful in their recruitment of and training for culturally repsonsive evaluation. The second activity in the first place is the production of synthesis of information from the activity and a propsal for submission to the National Science Foundation for implementing (and presumably conducting research on) advanced training utilizing the framework. This activity in the new funding would constitute the second phase.
