Chapter 4: The Evaluation of Project Start: Formative Evaluation and Multimethod Design

When the Miami Museum of Science and the University of Miami began planning for Project START (Southeast Student Teachers Are Revitalizing Teaching Through Technology)—a “train the trainers” catalyst project funded through the federal Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers for Technology Program (PT3) to help faculty throughout six Southeastern states to integrate technology resources into science curriculum—project staff considered what kind of external evaluation they wanted for their project. Did they want the evaluation to merely fulfill the requirements of the grant—to be, at best, a nonintrusive influence on the project? Given the current emphasis in the evaluation world on experimental design, they might have opted for an “objective” evaluation that would focus on measuring impact by controlling for contextual variables.