Date: Tuesday, May 19, 2026
Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
Hi! We are Andrew Grillo-Hill, Joshua Valcarcel, Kimberly Nguyen, Karen Melchior, Corynn Del Core, and Rasha Elsayed, the N3 evaluation team within WestEd’s STEM Evaluation Unit. The STEM Evaluation Unit serves as external evaluators for dozens of STEM education projects and programs each year, including for multiple NASA Science Mission Directorate Science Activation 2.0 projects, or SciAct for short.
As evaluators, our job is to look outward at whatever program we’re assessing for its impact, value-add, or how it can be improved in future iterations. Something not explicitly talked about though, is our responsibility as evaluators to take part in self-reflection and evaluate our own experiences, practices, and perspectives. Evaluating what’s happened and applying the lessons learned is a fundamentally invaluable skill. So, let’s evaluate our evaluation.
We serve as the external evaluators on NASA’s Neurodiversity Network – one of the aforementioned SciAct 2.0 projects – whose main goal is to provide a pathway to NASA participation and STEM employment for neurodiverse learners. At the end of the project’s five years, we are reflecting on what we learned and how we plan to apply that to our future work.
First, of course, we learned a lot about working with the population of neurodiverse youth this program serves. Over the duration of the project, we have had first-hand experience interacting with neurodiverse youth participating in either of the N3 program’s main two components: 1) redesigning existing NASA resources with significant input from high-school autistic learners and 2) an internship program for autistic high school students paired with a NASA Subject Matter Expert (SME).
From the onset of this project, the evaluation team sought to adopt a process of active and continuous commitment to learning when working with neurodivergent learners, as described by Tervalon & Murray-Garcia (1998). This learning journey has thus far focused on the experiences of neurodivergent individuals and included leaning on our program partners for training, reading books and articles collectively, and attending conferences. Our approach to building our knowledge of practices and beliefs around working with neurodivergent learners continues to support our interactions with neurodivergent participants and identify the programmatic nuances that might support or inhibit the achievement of the program’s goals.
Second, we learned how to adapt our evaluation practices and general ethos to better serve our participants. This included changing how we collect our data, and how we communicate findings in reporting.
Adapting data collection to participant needs is imperative in making the evaluation experience accessible for all involved. To increase data collection accessibility we shortened our interviews, offered multiple ways for respondents to participate, emphasized priming and made a point to be explicit.
Modifying the evaluation reporting process is critical to empowering participants while protecting their confidentiality. We are deliberate in our word choice to promote an assets, rather than a deficit perspective, and make sure to protect anonymity by using gender-neutral pronouns and removing identifying details about participants when quoting them about their experiences.
Lastly, we learned that making STEM education and career opportunities more accessible to neurodiverse youth truly benefits all learners. See how we redesigned our assent form here! The feedback from many other researchers and evaluators is that this redesign has been for great all their learners, neurodiverse or not, and ensures that they actually read what they consent to. Though these changes were originally created specifically for this project, these evaluation practices can improve experiences for all learners. Since making these changes, we have applied our learnings into making all of our evaluations more accessible. Now our evaluation planning emphasizes a culture of curiosity, continued learning, and applying that learning to the evaluation process itself.
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.