Client: National Building Museum | Location: Washington, DC
We partnered with the National Building Museum to assess the operations and achievement of their first endeavor into K-12 distance learning, Why Engineering?
OVERVIEW
We conducted a summative evaluation of the National Building Museum’s newly launched program, Why Engineering?, which was the National Building Museum’s first foray into distance learning. Our summative evaluation built on a previous formative evaluation of the program, in which we helped program planners identify areas of growth.
APPROACH
We used a mixed-method approach, which included:
Online program observations to identify the program’s strengths and weaknesses
Written student assessments to measure achievement of student outcomes
Telephone interviews to measure teacher outcomes and to contextualize student achievement
CLIENT TAKEAWAYS
Ultimately, we found that venturing into distance learning was a tall task for the museum, which did not have the appropriate infrastructure for such programs. While the program was effective in some ways, in other ways it faced major obstacles. Why Engineering? was successful in supporting student learning. Nearly all students learned something new from participating in the program and deepened their understanding of the role of engineers to work together to plan, design, and build.
However, we also identified obstacles to the program experience, mostly related to technology. For instance, both teacher interviews and student assessment responses indicated that poor audio quality affected students’ ability to understand the information and instructions provided during the program.
Ultimately, the biggest success of the program was the video interviews with engineers describing their work and inspiration. The museum realized that the videos could be useful in another format other than distance learning.
