246 - Curriculum Development and Partnership: A Case Study of Evaluation

Abstract Information: The evaluation of the FIRST in Product Development project provides insights into how an evaluation evolved from a traditional evaluation of implementation processes and student outcomes to include the evaluation of collaborations and partnerships. As part of this evolution, the voices of the project leaders, team members, pilot instructors, and students have been included in the evaluation. Specific aspects of the collaborations and partnerships were assessed, with formative data informing the project’s next steps. The FIRST in PD project is a grant-funded initiative to create curriculum and instructional materials in food product development for undergraduate programs. The project includes faculty members from multiple universities across the country who work together to develop online curriculum modules for use with students in Food Sciences programs. There is an advisory board of content experts and industry representatives who provide feedback on the content and structure of the curriculum modules. During the pilot of the modules, formative evaluation data was collected from the instructors, content creators, and students via surveys and focus groups. The impact of the curriculum on students’ learning was evaluated through pre- and post-tests of students at the start and end of terms. These assessments were developed by the content creators. Throughout the project, the leaders have worked closely with the evaluator to ensure that the data gathered is useful to them in assessing their progress toward their goals, and they respond quickly when changes are needed based on feedback from the advisory board or from the evaluation data. This project requires adaptation, patience, and flexibility from the evaluator and the project leaders, in a university atmosphere, which is traditionally one of slow change and rigid processes. When the leaders determined that they needed to change how the modules were being created and revised, the evaluation changed to add measures of the collaborations that were taking place. As the team developed stronger partnerships across institutions and assessed the contributions of the team members, the evaluation incorporated elements to assist in assessing these partnerships, and their relationships to the creation and use of the curriculum modules. Using the approach described in Assessing Research-Practice Partnerships: Five Dimensions of Effectiveness (Henrik, et al, 2017), the evaluation plan focuses on Dimension 1(building trust and cultivating partnership relationships), and Dimension 5 (building the capacity of participating researchers, practitioners, practice organizations, and research organizations to engage in partnership work). The dimensions have been interpreted to include the unique kind of partnerships in this project, and instruments have been created to assess the specific partnership goals. The final phase of the project involves determining how to maintain the curriculum modules and allow general access to them, along with periodically updating them to keep them current. The project team continues to work through this part of their work.