Closing The Assessment Feedback Loop: The Use Of A Qualitative Evaluation Process From The Joint Hybrid Electric Vehicle/Nsf Penn State Science Education Project

Penn State University has hosted a NSF sponsored GK-12 Outreach project for the past five years, and has just begun the second phase of the project. The Penn State project utilizes the talents of many science and engineering graduate students as teachers, mentors and role models for the K-12 classrooms. The project focuses on developing skills of students in the areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics through the use of Advanced Transportation Technologies. The GK-12 students are invited to participate in research in various ways in support of Advanced Transportation Technology such as undergraduate/graduate student competitions like Future Truck and Challenge X. The quantitative assessment planned at the onset of the project proved inadequate. Therefore, as the project progressed, a more qualitative approach was used to gather information about the attitudes of students with regard to science. As the project progressed, qualitative assessment was used to gather feedback from GK-12 teachers and students as to the value of the efforts, and served as a supportive feedback mechanism to the graduate students. This paper will review the assessment tools used in this project, and will present the data collected for the phase I and phase II of the project.