Developing STEM Academies Through the STEM Academy Measurement Tool

Authors: Tracy Irish, Susan Blunck, Anne Spence

The STEM Academy Measurement Tool and Rubric provide the structure and working concepts of the promising practices for the Project's eight schools to self-rate their progress in creating a STEM Academy. The Self-rating checklist allows each school's faculty to identify and summarize their school's progress and to determine which components will be the focus in the school for the following year.

The Director of Research and Evaluation with feedback from Executive Committee members developed an instrument which identifies the STEM Academy as a learning community and serves as the structural framework for school-based self-evaluation. The information from the self assessments including ratings on the thirty one components across four areas or elements consisting of Academy as Learning Community, Teacher Quality, Curriculum and Instruction, and Student Success.  Schools rated themselves on each component as beginning, at target, or leading. These scores from each school or Academy, which were supported through additional documentation, along with their analysis and next steps were presented at site visits. Site visit teams, comprised of university and school system executives, visited each school to discuss the ratings on the STEM Measurement Tool, to observe the school activities and to review the documented artifacts that were used to determine how the Academy should be rated on the instrument. From these site visits, site visit reports were written to provide external feedback and recommendations from the Executive Committee. The reports were sent to each administrator and STEM Academy team for distribution throughout the school. The Project hosted bi-annual site visits to measure continual growth of STEM Academies the first year and one site visit the second year. This ongoing process, including administrator professional development, fosters site-based distributed leadership and continual professional growth. It also allows the Project to utilize new measures for student success. 

The Measurement Tool and Rubric was developed primarily to provide working definitions and guidance to schools as they implemented the promising practices within their school buildings. Through the information gained at site visits and the documentation (artifacts) collected to support the schools self-ratings, data was more readily available to the overall evaluation of the Project.  These data provide quantitative measures of the impact of STEM initiatives for each Academy through the implementation of promising practices and unique school-based decisions on curriculum and instruction.

Table 1 Elements and Components of the STEM Academy Measurement Tool and Rubric

* Denotes Project's Promising Practices

Additional data from surveys and feedback in various meetings on the utilization of the STEM Academy Measurement Tool and Rubric will be presented to determine the school faculty's perception of the usefulness of the STEM MT and the site visit process.