NPASS2 [Taking NPASS to Scale] has been funded for three year to provide professional development for out-of-school time (OST) science trainers, administrators, and frontline staff serving youth from traditionally underserved and economically challenged groups in eight US states (CA, GA, MD, MN, MO, NH, NJ, OH.)
Deliverables include three-day, semi-annual train-the-trainer institutes in each state to prepare a new cadre of “Science Trainers” who can provide long term training and support to afterschool sites. The new Science Trainers will identify 5 - 10 OST sites to attend a series of half-day science trainings over a period of at least a year. Each session will introduce a new extended science project, initially from the Explore-It and Design-It series, to be implemented over a period of weeks in an afterschool setting. OST sites receive a materials kit and guide for the activities at each training session and occasional site visits from their trainer. Each year, 30 OST state leaders, 100 science trainers and over 500 youth workers will be reached at 750 community sites serving 22,000 youth.
The project evaluation to be conducted by the Goodman Research Group (GRG) employs a longitudinal design to determine participants' growth over time and the magnitude of change among the variables. The formative evaluation is designed to assess the development of the project's deliverables while the summative evaluation examines the OST science trainers, OST state network administrators, youth workers, and site administrators through a baseline survey, in addition to annual questionnaires and interviews of network administrators and OST site administrators.
Posted by CharlieH at September 22, 2009 01:14 PM