3.3 Reporting & evaluating

When implementing AutoSTEM project, teachers and educators should plan, implement and evaluate autostem pedagogical activities, following the templates presented in Module 5.

Aiming to promote an action-reflection perspective and teachers’ and educators’ professional learning on how to use automata for STEM, additional activities and templates are proposed in this section, most of them already referred in the templates for collecting piloting  In this scope, the learning cycle is extended to teachers and educators and a structured evaluation of the process is also fostered.

To accomplish this evaluation, we use various instruments that allow gathering varied information that will then be integrated into the reports. The reporting, with the gathered data, allows making a complete evaluation, making the process simpler as you already take conclusions and connect factors as you make the report. The report helps you get an overview of what the activity was, and you can, through that, understand what the flaws and the successes of your work were. Thus, the reporting and evaluating are a two-way process, since the two parts co-occur at the same time.

The evaluation of the AutoSTEM project activities is an inspiration and adaptation of the Multilevel Evaluation Model of Donald Kirkpatrick, which contemplates four levels of evaluation: reactions, learning, behaviour and results. This model is normally used in the evaluation of training, although, the categories used in this case allow to make a complete evaluation of the project since it takes into account so many topics. This multilevel model can also be used to evaluate teacher’s training to implement the project activities. In that case, there are also some materials that can be used, like more wide questionnaires with items that cover all four categories of the model.