UPDATED!

What if you reached the end of your project, which experienced great successes, but the industry employers in your region said your students were off the mark? To keep closely aligned to what employers want, ATE grantees should conduct workforce needs assessments, typically in the first year of the grant.

In this webinar, we will review the state of workforce needs assessments among ATE grantees. We will also describe solid methods that have led to successful assessments, featuring case examples from ATE experts (like Ken Bartlett). Finally, we will connect the program planning purpose of a workforce needs assessment with the uses it has for the evaluation of your grant.

Join us for a free 90 minutes of evaluation training! Click to register.

An intellectual merit criterion for the ATE program is that the grant-level evaluations should provide useful information to the project and others.  This workshop is designed for PI-evaluator teams seeking to enhance the usefulness of their evaluations while keeping them practical and cost-effective.  Evalua|t|e staff will facilitate hands-on activities in which participants clarify and solidify evaluation work plans and deliverables; establish or refine a logic model for their projects and use it to identify success indicators and performance standards; determine reporting needs, formats, and time lines; and identify strategies to develop, improve, and maintain productive working relationships between project evaluation staff. In addition, NSF program officers will present their expectations for evaluations of ATE grants. Other ATE PIs and evaluators will share best evaluation practices that participants can adopt to support project improvement. ATE PIs are encouraged to bring their evaluators to this session, along with project/evaluation planning materials, such as a project logic models, goals/objectives, and evaluation plans.

Guest presenters include
- Technology Initiative in Manufacturing and Engineering Project’s principal investigator, Sandra Harpole, and external evaluator, Linda Blount
- Florida Center for Advanced Technological Education’s principal investigator, Marilyn Barger, and external evaluator, Phil Centonze
- NSF ATE program officer Connie Della-Piana

Details and registration information are available on the conference website: www.aacc.nche.edu/Resources/aaccprograms/ate/conf2010//