Chicago Summer of Learning Self-Paced Online Badging Evaluation

The City of Chicago will embark on an innovative summer of learning (CSOL) in the summer of 2013, initiated by the Mayor?s office. CSOL engages a variety of youth serving oroganizations across the city in both self-paced and face-to-face STEM learning activites enabling students to earn STEM badges. This RAPID project creates an approach for tracking STEM program participation among young people by using youth's badging and online participation histories. While there is considerable interest and enthusiasm around the idea of STEM badges, there is actually a relatively thin set of evaluation/research findings around badges. This project can begin to fill in a piece of that gap by providing information on youth?s participation in CSOL, the degree to which social media plays a role, and a small follow-up study around youth's continued interest and engagement in the beginning of the school year. The team will use the data to look at patterns for student engagement that can lead to profiles of participation by different types of students along with patterns of behavior. All data will be made publicly available and will enable researchers to engage in inquiry about the impact of STEM informal learning participation on longer-term STEM outcomes. The evaluation study can lead to a useful research and evaluation infrastructure that can build knowledge about the impact of summer learning on youth's interest and engagement in STEM.