Exploring Past Investment in Learning through Grant-funded Undergraduate Advanced Technology Education Centers

NSF has made significant investments in ATE centers to promote the scaling and sustainability of advanced technological education at community colleges. Several centers were supported for many years over multiple funding cycles, often starting out as regional centers before scaling up nationally. During the life of the centers, much was learned through third-party evaluation, participation in the annual ATE program data-collection effort led by EvaluATE, and annual project reports. This project aims to study the impact of the centers in the post-award period. This study has the potential to identify those consequences that are most associated with scaling and sustainability. The lessons learned will be shared with the ATE community, and the NSF more generally, such that it will inform future Centers.

This project will explore the legacy of ATE centers by investigating which ideas, innovations, knowledge, and products developed by the center continue to evolve, to be used, and to influence technician education programs. Additionally, given that the centers are no longer funded, Principal Investigators (PIs) may be more willing to share missteps and lessons learned than they were while funded. Thus, the study will include PI reflections on the challenges the centers faced in maximizing their impact. It is expected that project outcomes will benefit: 1) current center PIs learning from their predecessors about how to scale and/or sustain elements of their centers and other elements that they may need to consider as they try to impact technical education; 2) proposers of new centers may gain a greater awareness of planning for scale and/or sustainability; 3) reviewers of ATE center proposals may be better equipped to judge the proposals; 4) NSF and other organizations that may want to adopt a center model may be more aware of the potential impact and possible limitations of a center-based approach to education; and 5) developing a model for post-funding reporting may support others looking to evaluate impacts.