A Review of Instruments to Evaluate Partnerships in Math and Science Education

Abstract

The importance of the role of partnerships in research is evidenced by the federal government's, private sector's, and nonprofit organizations' continued interest in and approach to funding research through these vehicles. In education research involving interorganizational partnerships, partnerships are needed to create coordination and alignment across institutions of higher education as well as within K-12 systems. Successful partnership building requires significant resources in terms of human effort and dollars spent. It is therefore critical that partnerships evaluate themselves and their activities. This article provides a description of and reviews instruments that measure different aspects of partnerships and further suggests that instead of using any instrument in toto, that it be modified for evaluation of specific traits of a partnership and validated in the local context. The article further provides an illustrative example of educational evaluation from the National Science Foundation's Math and Science Partnership Program, which calls for interinstitutional partnerships among institutions of higher education, local education agencies, state education agencies, and other for-profit and nonprofit entities.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This study is one in a series of substudies for the Math and Science Partnership Program Evaluation (MSP-PE) conducted for the National Science Foundation's MSP Program. The MSP-PE is conducted under Contract No. EHR-0456995. Since 2007, Bernice Anderson, Ed.D., Senior Advisor for Evaluation, Directorate for Education and Human Resources, has served as the National Science Foundation Program Officer. The author, from COSMOS Corporation, is Jennifer Scherer.

The MSP-PE is led by COSMOS Corporation in current partnership with George Mason University (GMU) and Brown University. Robert K. Yin (COSMOS) serves as Principal Investigator and Jennifer Scherer (COSMOS) serves as one of three Co-Principal Investigators. Additional Co-Principal Investigators and their collaborating institutions (including discipline departments and math centers) are Patricia Moyer-Packenham (USU, formerly GMU) and Kenneth Wong (Brown).

Notes

²The four remaining key features include (a) teacher quality, quantity, and diversity; (b) challenging courses and curricula; (c) evidence-based design and outcomes; and (d) institutional change and sustainability

²In reviewing a sample of MSP grants, all of the partnerships, except for one, enacted the partnership with the partners originally proposed. In the one partnership that differed from the original set of partners proposed it enacted one district-level partner that was not proposed and did not enact one district-level partner that was proposed

³National Library of Congress, National Science Foundation Authorization Act of 2002 (Public Law 107-368), U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC

⁴Many good institutional partnerships are driven by strong interpersonal relationships within the institutional partnerships. The interpersonal relationship may have been the original driver, but there is a real need for interpersonal and institutional connectivity

⁵There is no intended value in the continuum (e.g., from good to bad or vice versa)

⁶This article does not address issues related to how one selects instruments that might be adopted for local use or how to validate instruments for local use. General references for these tasks are included, however.