Building practical approaches to STEM outreach evaluation

8 July 2026 5 min read

Delivering STEM outreach in regional and rural schools comes with real challenges: tight timetables, long travel distances and diverse classroom needs. But it also offers a powerful opportunity: to connect students with STEM in ways that feel relevant, hands-on and achievable.

For UNSW CURIOUS and CSIRO Education and Outreach’s STEM-INSIGHTS Capability Enhancer, the shared goal was two-fold: moving beyond understanding how to deliver more outreach, to designing and adapting outreach in ways that work in regional school contexts, while also building evidence about what supports student engagement, relevance and longer-term STEM participation.

Over six months in 2025, the collaboration set out to answer a simple but important question: how can STEM outreach not only inspire students, but also show its impact and improve over time?

CURIOUS objectives

At its core, CURIOUS (Connecting University Research and Innovative Outreach for Underrepresented Students) focuses on expanding access to STEM learning.

The program supports high school students in regional and rural NSW to engage with high-quality STEM experiences, with a strong emphasis on hands-on activities and opportunities to meet scientists and see STEM as a possible pathway for themselves.

A key priority is building scientific literacy and supporting engagement with STEM among students from schools with low socio educational advantage and high proportions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.

Capability Enhancer objectives

To strengthen this work and enable the CURIOUS team to build on their existing evaluation capability, the CURIOUS team took part in a pilot round of STEM-INSIGHTS Capability Enhancer (CE), made possible through funding from the NSW Government’s Science and Industry Endowment Fund.

The goal of the collaboration was to strengthen evaluation capability from within, with the CE team serving as a critical friend and working alongside the CURIOUS team to better define what success looks like, track progress more consistently, and use evidence to strengthen both the program and broader STEM outreach efforts.

What we did

Rather than developing evaluation approaches in isolation, the two teams worked side by side, testing ideas in real time as the program was designed and delivered.

An impact pathway for the CURIOUS project

How the initiative was intended to contribute to outcomes over time

OUTCOME
1

Initiative design 

Activities developed and tested 
with formative evaluation checkpoints.

OUTCOME 
2

Delivery in context 

Activities selected, adapted, and delivered 
in ways that work for regional schools.

OUTCOME
3

Learning experience 

Activities designed for engagement, relevance, 
inclusion, role models, and a positive influence.

OUTCOME
4

STEM development 

Positive influence on students’ attitudes 
to STEM and STEM identity; important for 
longer-term STEM participation and pathways.

OUTCOME
5

Long-term outcomes 

Validation of the Trellis approach for follow-up 
of student outcomes; CURIOUS long-term impact 
from a catalogue of reusable activity plans and 
durable outreach processes established.

This impact pathway links initiative design and delivery with participant 
experience, STEM development, and longer-term contribution. 

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This included regular working sessions, where practical monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) approaches were developed together, alongside ongoing mentoring between sessions.

During the initial delivery of the outreach activities, the CE team joined on the ground, observing delivery, gathering insights, and providing immediate feedback on everything from participant experience to data collection methods.

Together, the teams co-developed a program logic (also known as an impact pathway) and evaluation framework, ensuring there was a clear link between what CURIOUS delivers and the difference it aims to make.

Alongside this work, the collaboration also explored more structured ways to support consistent delivery across different schools. One approach was a catalogue-style model, where outreach activities are defined and organised in a way that makes them easier to deliver, adapt and scale across varied school contexts.

Importantly, all of this work was grounded in the realities of regional STEM outreach. Evaluation approaches were shaped to be practical and flexible, designed to fit into busy classrooms without placing unnecessary burden for teachers or students.

What we both learned

As the collaboration progressed, it became clear that strong intent alone isn’t enough; defining and measuring impact takes time, clarity and iteration.

When the CURIOUS team joined the pilot, they were still working on how to define measures of success and consistently track outcomes across the program. Testing approaches in delivery contexts helped sharpen this thinking. It reinforced that evaluation needs to be integrated into program design from the outset and tailored to the environments in which it is used. For example, the CURIOUS and CE teams worked together to develop a formative evaluation approach, and feedback from the pilot informed how evidence could be used to strengthen the delivery of STEM outreach activities.

One of the biggest strengths of the partnership was complementary expertise each team brought. Bringing together evaluation expertise and delivery experience led to approaches that were not only robust, but genuinely usable in practice.

At the same time, the process wasn’t without challenges. Early conversations highlighted the need to align on scope and expectations, particularly around what level of evaluation capability could realistically be custom developed within the program’s timeframes and resources.

For the CE team, this highlighted an important lesson for future collaborations: the value of agreeing early on what is feasible, and designing evaluation approaches that match the scale and capacity of the program.

Ultimately, the experience highlighted the importance of designing evaluation approaches that match the scale, budget and capacity of the program from the outset. For smaller programs, highly customised evaluation frameworks can be disproportionately costly, making practical and reusable approaches essential.

What’s next: sharing and building on these learnings

The impact of the collaboration is already shaping the future of CURIOUS.

Insights from the partnership are being used to redesign parts of the program, including improving feedback tools, refining data collection methods, and better aligning delivery with school contexts and student needs.

This collaboration also shaped how the STEM-INSIGHTS CE team plans future co-creation activities:

• It improved the CE team’s understanding of the type and depth of capability building approaches that are suitable for supporting STEM program providers to adopt or adapt evidence-based tools with limited resources.
• The work surfaced the need to better define where evaluation capability is required, and at what level, across different roles.
• It also informed the CE team’s ways of working, which now focus on developing a catalogue of tools and supporting programs to adopt or adapt them, as well as collaborating on new approaches.

Beyond the program itself, there is a clear opportunity to contribute to wider sector learning. Both teams plan to share frameworks, tools and insights through the STEM-INSIGHTS Knowledge Hub, helping other organisations strengthen their own approaches to STEM outreach and evaluation.

There is also growing interest in scalable delivery models, such as the catalogue-style approach tested in CURIOUS, which could help standardise quality and expand reach across the sector.

At its heart, this collaboration shows that improving STEM outreach isn’t just about individual programs. It’s about building shared systems, tools and knowledge that can be adapted and scaled, so more young people can access meaningful STEM learning opportunities.