Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline: A Community Resource

The Computing Research Association’s (CRA) Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline (CERP) was established in 2013 by CRA-W and the Coalition to Diversify Computing with a mission to promote diversity through evaluation and research. CERP’s vision is to be a resource for the computing community that fulfills the need for national data collection, comparative and longitudinal evaluation, and engagement with the community for dissemination of broadening participation in computing (BPC) related research and evidence based best practices. The Center’s activities are centered around data, evaluation and research, and community engagement. As part of this project, CERP provides the computing community with resources in these areas to support the collective effort to create a strong computing education and workforce pipeline. CERP’s activities are designed based on the community’s needs and adjusted in a timely manner depending on the changing demands. Being part of CRA, a service-oriented organization, CERP maintains the expertise of professional staff to offer continuous support to the community’s BPC efforts. CERP’s work on setting up infrastructures for large scale data collection and systematic evaluation services, coupled with the Center’s efforts to connect with the computing community, makes it uniquely suited to act as a central resource. This project aims to bring CERP’s services and activities under one umbrella to support the computing community’s efforts to broaden participation in the field. CERP’s data resources will include large scale longitudinal surveys of computing students at the higher education level and professionals, departmental level data, and curation of data resources from third party sources. CERP’s evaluation services will range from scalable comparative evaluation to customized program impact assessments. CERP’s community engagement activities will utilize BPCnet.org and its associated projects to provide curated resources (e.g. BPCnet.org Resource Library, BPCnet.org Statistics and Data Hub), services (e.g., consultancy), and events (e.g., workshops, webinars) for the computing community. This project will generate data and resources that will contribute to our collective knowledge on computing education and broadening participation. CERP’s national level data sources will be available for all researchers to answer questions regarding computing education and gain a better insight into individuals’ experiences in computing. Further, the services (e.g., evaluation, BPC consultancy) provided by this project will benefit the computing community broadly and computing education community more specifically. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.