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Screenshot from the My Skills My Life results page showing three personality types

My Skills My Life quiz results

Designing an evaluation plan to measure the impact of a STEM tool for girls

Women are seriously under-represented in STEM careers in the UK. WISE launched My Skills My Life in 2019 - a digital and paper engagement tool inspiring 11-19 year old girls about careers in STEM. WISE approached Common in 2021, to help them develop an evaluation strategy to measure the impact the tool was having.

Screenshot from the My Skills My Life results page showing three personality types

My Skills My Life quiz results

Explorations

Framing Opportunity

Generating Ideas

Build & Test

Timeline

August 2021 to February 2022

About

The problem of under-representation starts at school, where many girls who have done well in those subjects decide not to pursue them beyond the age of 16, believing that STEM careers are ‘for the boys’. My Skills My Life was launched by WISE (Women into Science and Engineering) in January 2019. My Skills My Life is a digital and paper engagement tool that helps 11-19 year old girls match with their ‘science types’ and connect with a range of inspiring role models, jobs and information about careers in STEM.

Since it launched, My Skills My Life continued to be used and the team had collected some data on interactions with the tool, but there had been little formal evaluation of the tool’s impact. WISE approached Common in 2021 to work with them and the My Skills My Life stakeholders to review and develop the tool’s use and evaluation strategy, so they could understand the impact the tool was having.

The programme of work included:

  • An inception workshop to set evaluation audit goals
  • A data audit to review data already being captured through My Skills My Life
  • Creating a Theory of Change for how My Skills My Life aims to create impact and identifying measurable outcomes
  • Running a gap analysis of the data audit against the theory of change
  • Prioritisation workshop to review the initial findings and discuss the priorities for the evaluation strategy

Taking all of the above on board, Common developed a set of evaluation recommendations for My Skills My Life to take forward. Topline these included:

  • Incorporating further data collection within the tool
  • Running a pre-post evaluation survey with a sub-sample of users

You can read more about the background to the tool and our work with WISE to develop My Skills My Life here.

“Common Collective are well organised, knowledgeable in their field & work in a fantastically collaborative way to ensure that projects run smoothly and effectively. They are excellent at finding creative solutions to problems, pulling ideas out of individuals by asking the right questions and thinking outside the box. Working alongside Common Collective has been an absolute pleasure & I hope to collaborate again in the future.” Katherine Watson, WISE

People

Katherine Jennings, Dr Rebecca Bendayan, Florence Nolan

Disciplines

Campaign evaluation, behavioural science, kids and youth

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