Projects: Program Evaluation and Education Research (PEER) Group

DeSIRE is a partnership between the College of Engineering and the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation at North Carolina State University (NCSU), the NC Mathematics and Science Education Network Pre-College Program (MSEN), the Edgecombe County Public Schools (ECPS) district, and local advanced manufacturing industry. The Friday Institute (FI) is pleased to serve as the research partner for the DeSIRE project.

The purpose of this pilot study will be to understand what undergraduates at NC State University know and believe about the field of educational research.

ESTEEM will facilitate the infusion of statistics content and pedagogy into undergraduate mathematics teacher preparation by providing faculty with technological and curricular resources, networking experiences and ongoing support.

This project team will conduct a baseline analysis of the digital divide among Durham Public Schools families prior to the implementation of their 1:1 initiative.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the efficacy of the use of ASSISTments to support students' mathematics homework completion, differentiated instruction and ultimately students' understanding of mathematics.

The North Carolina Community Colleges System Office has contracted with the Friday Institute to study costs associated with instruction.

This initiative seeks to build a diverse regional leadership team in the state’s Northeast Prosperity Zone and provide leadership training to cross-county project teams to identify untapped regional opportunities for economic growth and development.

The NC State College of Education’s Friday Institute and the Belk Center for Community College Leadership and Research partnered together to study how early childhood education (ECE) programs in North Carolina community colleges navigated the COVID-19 pandemic.

This project will establish NC State as a national center addressing the critical need to provide pre-college students with foundational knowledge and skills in computational thinking.

During the 2019-20 academic year, the Friday Institute established a modified research-practice partnership with Manning Elementary School (Roanoke Rapids, NC) and Centennial Campus Magnet Middle School (Raleigh, NC). 

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Homework (HW) Gap Hotspot Grant seeks to expand access to broadband services and further establish public libraries as essential partners in reducing the homework gap.

The Kenan Fellows Program for Teacher Leadership addresses the critical need for high-quality professional development for educators and is the largest STEM-focused teacher leadership program in North Carolina.

The Learning Analytics in STEM Education Research (LASER) Institute is a professional development program for early and mid-career researchers and funded by the National Science Foundation (ECR: BCSER).

The Friday Institute will create and develop a sustainable community of elementary teachers to support ongoing integration of computer science (CS) concepts into core content areas.

Since 2018, the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation, Center for Applications of Psychological Type and the Myers & Briggs Foundation, and A.B. Combs Leadership Magnet Elementary School have engaged in a research-practice partnership to create a new model for application of the MMTIC® instrument to improve instruction and student's social, emotional and academic decision-making in public schools in Wake County, North Carolina.

The Friday Institute evaluation team is providing technical support to Participate for the evaluation of their Global Gateway Program.

This project focuses on providing professional development (PD) for elementary education majors in computer science, especially on how to integrate computing concepts into the ‘regular’…

This evaluation of teacher career ladder pilot initiatives will allow us to generate in-depth, multi-year case studies of three pilots.

This interdisciplinary study focuses on developing ways to promote and measure interest in and preparation for STEM majors and careers.

This project will address the need for undergraduate prospective secondary mathematics teachers to possess strong content knowledge in order to develop in their future students the rich mathematical understandings necessary to pursue STEM careers.

With a three-year grant from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, The Innovation Project (TIP) and its partners developed and supported an inter-district network focused on redesigning learning environments to better address the early learning needs of vulnerable children. In its first two years, the Early Learning Network (ELN) engaged school design teams and principals from 36 schools in 12 North Carolina districts in a cohort-based program defined by three interrelated activities that together enable transformative results: transformation through school design; coaching for entrepreneurial school leadership; and innovative district supports.

This internship is a paid work-study opportunity for undergraduate students to learn new research, evaluation and leadership skills. Interns will receive training in educational research and evaluation techniques while contributing to PEER Group projects.

Reedy Creek and the Friday Institute are partnering to develop a culture of computational thinking within Reedy Creek's digital sciences magnet program.

The initial aim of a research-practice partnership between the Friday Institute and UNC-TV is to define a comprehensive and systemic research approach aligned to the mission of UNC-TV to provide content and services that educate, engage and inspire audiences, communities and partners.

The proposed study will focus on the summer reading camp component of Read to Achieve.

Since 2016-17, The FIRE Team has worked closely with digiLEARN to design and ongoing annual and semi-annual evaluations of the program. The unique, small-scale evaluation is guided by just-in-time evaluation methods aimed at providing information at critical times, and developmental evaluation methods aimed at providing information that might result in changes to model itself.

The Friday Institute's primary roles in this project include co-facilitation of myFutureNC Commission meetings, data collection, and analysis and write-up of data collected.

As one of seven project partners, the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation led the research for the Connected Educators Project, focusing on the utilization of evaluation tools and techniques designed to assess the development and impact of online communities.

The primary goal of the IMPACT evaluations was to determine whether the implementation of the IMPACT model of integrating technology into teaching and learning in North Carolina K-12 schools made a significant difference in student outcomes.

This evaluation was designed to provide formative feedback for program improvement and determine impact on the target goals of each initiative and on overall state-level outcome goals.

The goal of Educational Leadership Academies is to increase student achievement by preparing and retaining principals in high-poverty, hard-to-staff and historically low-performing schools.

The goal of this evaluation was to study Vance County’s one-to-one learning initiative, the “I3nnovate” project.

The Friday Institute completed several assessments of North Carolina's progress toward ensuring effective incorporation of technology in K-12 education.

Working with partners, our team is evaluating and building evaluation-capacity at the school and district level for the Golden Leaf Foundation’s STEM Initiative.

MISO is a campus-wide project that seeks to determine the collective STEM impact of NC State University through its pre-college outreach and extension programs.

Noyce METS is designed to increase the number of highly qualified mathematics teachers committed to working with students in high-needs schools.

From August 2016 through February 2019, the Friday Institute Research and Evaluation Team (FIRE Team) partnered with the STEM East leadership to build the evaluation capacity of 7 network districts who received STEM education grants from the Golden LEAF Foundation. Specifically, the FIRE Team worked with districts leadership teams to more strategically plan, execute, evaluate, and maintain their district’s STEM programs.

The overarching goal of the Students Discover project is to use the pathway of Citizen Science to improve STEM education in middle school.

The Friday Institute Research and Evaluation Group led the evaluation of the Hill Center “Learning Collaborative" through design-based implementation research, engaging all partners in the design, implementation and iterative refinement of a scalable model for implementing and sustaining HillRAP in a variety of settings and contexts.

In collaboration with the Industrial Extension Service at NC State, the Friday Institute Evaluation Team was responsible for the formative and summative evaluation of the Mission Critical Operations (MCO) program.