The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s Office of Education launched the Summer of Innovation Project (SoI) in 2010 in response to President Obama’s “Educate to Innovate” campaign. SoI is a multi-year project intended to engage the nation’s youth in NASA’s broad mission and to inspire them to pursue education in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields leading to involvement in the country’s STEM workforce.

The 2013 evaluation efforts focused on investigating the SoI stand-alone model, which holds particular promise as a summer engagement model for middle school students that may be replicable across Federal Government programs. Camps implementing the stand-alone model offer middle school students a minimum dosage of 30 hours of selected NASA SoI curricula, independent of other summer programming.

This report, the third in a series of reports from this evaluation, presents findings related to outcomes of interest to SoI. Using a one-group, pre-post comparison design, this report assessed whether there were observable changes in SoI students’ interest and engagement in science, how SoI student outcomes compared to other middle school students, and explored if and to what extent outcomes varied by camp quality and characteristics.