CPATH’s activities are being evaluated and monitored on several levels. Within select projects funded by the National Science Foundation, project evaluators are monitoring and assessing progress. At the program level, SRI International’s Center for Science, Technology, and Economic Development is providing evaluation and monitoring of all CPATH activities. The evaluation and monitoring project being undertaken is designed to be conducted over a five year period, with a base year of planning and designing a project monitoring system and a rigorous evaluation protocol, with four following years implementing and managing the project monitoring tool and conducting the evaluation and supporting NSF in its efforts to showcase the program. The project has three major components:

1. Design an objective external evaluation for the CPATH program based upon state-of-the-art evaluation tools and methods in keeping with guidelines established by the Academic Competitiveness Council of the American Competitiveness Initiative. This part of the project will conduct professional evaluation of the awards themselves as well as comparing the progress within the institutions conducting CPATH projects with others that do not have external government support. This part of the project will include a series of site visits to view and evaluate the CPATH activities in their home institutions.
2. Provide capacity building and technical assistance to the institutions that have received CPATH awards to ensure that they are able to track and monitor the progress of their activities, and to help diffuse good practices and lessons learned from these projects to other parts of the computer science education field.
3. Serve as a central information hub about CPATH and the CPATH awardees, collecting and making available information about undergraduate computer science and evaluation of these activities; and collecting data on the transformation of undergraduate computer science in the United States.

For information, please contact the SRI study team director, Nancy Adelman, CPATH Program Evaluation Leader, at SRI International, 703.247.8434, or Ray McGhee at 703.247.8573