CCT is serving as the external evaluator of The Cooper Union’s STEM Saturdays program. The immersive, 10-week outreach program in New York City targets high-achieving yet under-represented early high-school students. The goals of the program are to cultivate STEM engagement, foster real-world STEM skills, promote a realistic understanding of what it takes to do STEM, and support students’ ability to progress along the STEM pathway.

The purpose of the evaluation research is to understand and document promising practices of the STEM Saturdays program and others like it, and to better understand how student development, readiness, and learning behaviors unfold as outcomes of the program. Our research will result in knowledge about promising curricular and pedagogical practices in out-of- school–time STEM outreach programs that will help to guide program implementation and shape the development of a dependable program model going forward.