1. Elizabeth YellowBird Research Assistant UND – RAIN Program PhD Student August 8, 2009

2.  “Culture is first and foremost a shared way of making sense of experience, based on shared history.” Erickson (1986) explains: “Through culture humans share learned systems for defining meaning, and in given situations of practical action, humans often seem to have created similar meaning interpretations.”  “Because the subculture of Western science can conflict with the cultures of the First Nations students, learning Western science is recognized as a culture acquisition that requires Aboriginal students to cross cultural borders from everyday subcultures of their peers, family, and the tribe, to the subcultures of school, school science and science itself.” (Aikenhead, 1999) 2

3.  Evaluation: To find the value, to examine, interpret, rate or judge  Who’s interests are being served or affected, who are the stakeholders? It is extremely important to identify stakeholders. “All evaluations are not good evaluations and all evaluations do not have impact” (Terry Denny Professor Emeritus – U Of Illinois Champaign) 3 3

4.  Evaluation is integral to overall goal of TCUP projects  Evaluations provide feedback to help improve projects and provides information to make good decisions  Consider impact in years 2, 3 and 4.  Evaluations offer necessary information to different groups of stakeholders  Evaluations must address each objective of project  Assessment and evaluation are valuable resources for relevant knowledge creation and development  “Good evaluations can be rough and not fun, but should be truthful and helpful” (Terry Denny Professor Emeritus – U Of Illinois Champaign) 4

5.  According to the Department of Interior – Bureau of Indian Affairs there are 569 recognized tribes  Given this information: How do we judge quality, what is “good”? Have you ever been “poor”, “cold”, “normal”? How do we judge culture? How do you document ceremonies, sweats, smudging, etc? Who is defining the value or culture? Who set the standards of worthiness? Who does appraising, who does evaluation? Whose interests do these definitions serve? 5

6.  Curriculum development  Faculty development  Use of technology  Student recruitment and retention  Collaboration 6

7.  What is Indian Self-determination and sovereignty and how do they effect the project?  Tribal Councils are ultimate authority within reservation boundaries  Tribal councils are responsible for protecting their people’s civil rights  Tribes always retain ownership of the data  Tribal resolutions are important  You need to understand what these concepts are. What is “political status” and “power relationships”? 7

8.  Evaluation results must be viewed by stakeholders as relevant and useful  Provides information to communicate to: Funding agencies-TCUP, NSF, BIA, etc Administrators-TCU, Tribe, school Faculty, students, the public-Native American community 8

9.  Begin at the beginning, is this your first grant from TCUP and ask what the stakeholders want; Prepare for the evaluation when you write the grant.  Evaluation must be seen through the eyes of the participants and their “ways of knowing” and knowledge creation, engage stakeholders.  Comparisons should occur within the community.  The Native American culture is continually evolving, how does this affect the grant?  Consider statistics authors and motive for collection.  Evaluators should be involved within the community as much as possible and experience the culture

10.  If you are doing a math study and the results indicate that your students from a particular tribal college or reservation are not learning, what do you do?  What if the results indicate that the white students “know” more or “performed” better? 10

11.  Erickson, F. (1986). Qualitative methods in research on teaching. In M. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (pp. 119-161). New York: Macmillian  LaFrance, J (2004). New Directions for Evaluation, no. 102, summer 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Ind.  Aikenhead, G. (1999). Cross-cultural science education: a cognitive explanation of a cultural phenomenon. Journal of Research in Science Teaching. 36, 269-287. 11