Methodology for the Evaluation of the National Science Foundation’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR)

October, 2014
IDA document: D-5322
FFRDC: Science and Technology Policy Institute
Type: Documents
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Authors
Brian L. Zuckerman, Rachel A. Parker, Thomas W. Jones, Brian Q. Rieksts See more authors
This presentation was prepared for a meeting of the American Evaluation Association in October 2014. It presents background regarding the National Science Foundation’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) program itself, including a synopsis of the program’s legislative authorization, goals, and descriptive statistics regarding eligibility and participating jurisdictions. The EPSCoR program logic model is presented, identifying the legislatively mandated goals— increasing the competitiveness of investigators for NSF and other Federal funding and increasing participating jurisdictions’ science and engineering research bases—and the program’s theory of action to reach those goals. The presentation concludes with an overview of the methods that were used to conduct the evaluation.