The seminar will focus on lessons I have learnt as the evaluation researcher on the RCUK-funded ‘Engaging Opportunities’ School-University Partnership Initiative (SUPI) project and the Catalyst project.  This will explain how and why an action-research approach was adopted to evaluate our flexible and adaptable framework (open lectures, open dialogues, open creativity and open inquiry) for progressively improving the quality of activities we deliver.  This will be followed by a group discussion on the public engagement with research (PER) impacts each type of activity may have on students (key stage 3, 4 and 5), teachers and researchers at the different stages of the research cycle.  To conclude, the beginnings of a conceptual model will be presented as a possible approach to help researchers strategically plan their use of PER-activities, methods-of-data-collection and techniques-of-analysis to meet their evaluation-research objectives.

Evaluation is an essential part of engaging the public with your research and can make a big contribution to the strength of your pathways to impact plans.  Evaluation is research and it needs to be strategically planned if it’s going to provide meaningful insights.  However, I recognise that not everyone has experience of planning and carrying out evaluation.  Therefore, I hope that this seminar will prove useful to shed light on the relative value of public engagement activities, in addition to designing fit-for-purpose evaluation forms, interview schedules etc.