BPC Shared Measures

BPC Alliances worked together as part of the “BPC-DP: Developing Shared Measures Among the BPC Community” project to explore and agree on a shared measurement framework. This project was funded by the National Science Foundation as a BPC demonstration project (NSF award 2137842) and was built on prior data collection efforts. The project was led by CRA’s Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline (CERP) and SageFox Consulting Group and completed in four phases:

Phase 1: Framing (October 2021-March 2022)

This phase set the foundation for collaborative work by developing an understanding of the history upon which this project was building; individual and collective goals of the alliances, current measurement activities and seeking areas of commonality. This group also explored the current opportunities and limitations for reporting the true value of their work given NSF reporting structures. During this phase the group identified capacity building as the priority for exploration through this project. The group also reviewed and agreed to a recommended set of participation measures for gathering data about program participants.

Phase 2: Collaborative Work (April 2022-December 2022)

At a two-day, face-to-face meeting the group did a deep dive into what capacity building looks like at the alliance level and they generated a set of constructs across the community to test through a shared reporting template.

Phase 3: NSF BPC Alliance Implementation Efforts (December 2022-June 2023)

Alliances tested and revised the reporting template. During this time the alliances met regularly to give greater definitional clarity to the con- structs.

Phase 4: Aggregating Lessons Learned, Sharing Findings, and Defining a Sustainability Plan (March 2023-June 2024)

Aggregating results confirmed that the capacity building constructs could be gathered and aggregated across alliances with some confidence. During this time the participation measures were also piloted with the larger BPC community as part of the CISE-EWF PI meeting. The group met with the NSF and produced technical reports and recommendations to be hosted on the BPCnet.org website.

Measurement Templates

The BPC Shared Measures project resulted in two sets of measurement templates:

Technical Report

The project team also collaborated with Dr. Monica McGill and Dr.Julie Smith of Institute for Advancing Computing Education (CSEdResearch.org) to produce a technical report documenting the process of coming up with a shared measurement framework and lessons learned in the process. 

Building Shared Measures for Broadening Participation Initiatives