Evaluating the Impact of a National Science Foundation Program Support Center on the Gender of Grantees

• In Event: Understanding the Possibilities of STEM Initiatives to Support Minoritized Populations

Abstract

In 2013, NSF funded the Center on Innovative Research in Cyberlearning (CIRCL) to support the Cyberlearning and Future Learning Technologies (CFLT) program, the first such programmatic support center outside NSF’s Directorate on Education and Human Resources (EHR). One difficulty NSF confronts when funding such centers, however, is quantifying their value added to the research communities they serve and to NSF itself. This paper uses publically available administrative data and quasi-experimental methods to investigate the impact of CIRCL on the CFTL program, specifically CIRCL’s impact on the gender composition of cohorts of CFLT grantees. This investigation promises to establish more rigorous methods for evaluating support centers as well as inform federal efforts to broaden participation in computer science.

Author

• Kevin L. Brown, NORC at the University of Chicago