Evaluation Services

REEd provides program evaluation services to university-based and public sector partners. Our support to university-based faculty include those with programs supported by federal grants. At UC Davis, evaluation services support NSF funded projects such as the ADVANCE Program, an institutional transformation grant to increase the participation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers, the LSAMP/CAMP Bridge to Doctorate Program which seeks to increase the number of underrepresented minorities in STEM fields, a MAST NOYCE funded scholarship designed to recruit highly qualified STEM majors into the teaching profession, the Research Training Group (RTG) in the Department of Statistics designed to prepare undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral students to conduct research that uses statistics in innovative ways, as well as the USDA multi-institutional Thrips-Tospovirus Educational Network (TTEN) grant which seeks to recruit, mentor and provide interdisciplinary training for graduate and undergraduate research scholars. 

Our external university evaluation projects include the NSF funded Network Science IGERT program at UC Santa Barbara, which seeks to provide training and mentoring to students, from a variety of disciplines, around innovative approaches to network science, as well as the privately funded Teacher Scholars Program at Mills College.  Our work with Mills College includes an evaluation of their program with supporting schools and districts to implement inquiry-based approaches to improving practice and enhancing learning outcomes for students, in addition to the development of an evaluation protocol which their leadership team can utilize for on-going evaluation.

In the public sector, REEd recently completed an independent evaluation of the appropriateness and effectiveness of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) Career Technical Education (CTE) Program. The California Budget Act of 2015 required that an evaluation report shall be provided to the Budget Committee and the Public Safety Policy Committee of the California Legislature by April 1, 2017. REEd was contracted to fulfill the requirement of this legislative mandate. We implemented a case study design at six correctional institutions to identify program successes and challenges and to provide recommendations for program improvements. Evaluation activities included in-depth individual interviews with current students, program instructors, classification counselors, and site-, department-, and state-level CDCR leadership. The evaluation included a quantitative analysis of inmate access to programming using simple descriptive statistics.