Evaluating Impact of STEM Design and Mentorship in Durham

Timeline

2026

Description

A team of students led by BME professor Megan Madonna, director of Ignite, will transform Ignite’s raw program data into a clean, multi-year database capturing attendance, engagement, retention, survey outcomes, and classroom observations from 2021 to the present. They will analyze data from the 2025–2026 implementation while expanding and standardizing past datasets to make trends easily interpretable for non-experts. The team will also build predictive models linking in-class engagement to constructs such as engineering identity, resilience, and STEM self-efficacy, and develop automated tools to support future longitudinal research. This work will produce a usable database, reproducible modeling code, and visualizations that directly support upcoming evaluation efforts.

View the team's poster here:

Team

Members

Abigail Bellot, Anusha Kamath, Ken Midford, Luis Pastor-Valverde
 

Leaders

Project Lead: Megan Madonna (BME)

Project Manager: Dennis Tang