The Academy’s evaluation
The objectives of the Academy’s evaluation – the pre-project and long-term tracking surveys – are to assess:
- The type of engineers involved in Ingenious projects – their age, gender, ethnicity, employment status, prior experience of public engagement
- The long-term impact of Ingenious projects on their skills, knowledge, and attitudes towards public engagement
The Academy need this data to monitor the effectiveness of the Ingenious programme, and secure future funding from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
We need you to distribute the pre-project questionnaire to your engineers and let them know that they will be receiving the long-term tracking survey about a year after your project has finished.
Your evaluation
Your evaluation is in addition to the Academy’s pre-project, and long-term tracking surveys.
The aim of your evaluation is to learn useful lessons for future public engagement work. For example testing new ways to engage the public with engineering; reach under-served audiences; increase the impact of public engagement activities; train engineers in public engagement; involve engineers in co-creating public engagement activities.
For your public audiences – school students, teachers, families, adults - your evaluation will assess:
- The number and type of people reached through your public engagement activities
- The extent to which your public engagement activities were enjoyable, informative, inspiring and thought-provoking
- What specifically they gained from the experience
- Any barriers to engagement that they encountered e.g. content pitched at the wrong level, unappealing activities, etc
- How they feel your future public engagement activities could be improved
The Academy requires that Grant Holders use one of the two sets of standardised questions in the evaluation they conduct with public audiences. For more on this see guidance on using the standardised questions in your evaluation.
For the engineers working on your Ingenious project – helping you develop and deliver your public engagement activities - your evaluation will assess:
- Whether they had the training and support they needed
- What specific public engagement skills and knowledge they feel that they have gained
- Whether they encountered any problems during the project e.g. difficulty running activities, difficulty engage particular audiences etc
- How they feel your future public engagement projects could be improved – in particular in terms of working with other engineers