Twenty-first century skills are vital for preparing our nation’s youth to become tomorrow’s innovators, researchers, and leaders in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. STEM out-of-school time (OST) programs play an important role in helping youth develop the 21st century skills they need to prepare them for the workforce, particularly the teamwork skills necessary for the growing collaborative nature of work in STEM (National Research Council, 2015). However, there is a lack of appropriate tools to evaluate this key programmatic outcome in STEM OST settings. Many evaluators of middle and high school STEM OST programs need to develop their own data collection tools, modify existing tools, or use ones that lack appropriate validity evidence for the population and/or context being studied. Through funding from the National Science Foundation, we carried out the Collaboration in the 21st Century (C2C) project to help address this need by developing and validating a survey, the Youth Teamwork Skills Survey, to measure the teamwork skill of team communication in middle and high school STEM OST programs. The development and validation process for the Youth Teamwork Skills Survey resulted in a survey that evaluators can be confident will gather reliable data, has adequate validity evidence for use with STEM OST programs (including EE programs), and is grounded in what actually occurs in these programs.

The manual provides an overview of how team communication skills are defined, the reliability and validity evidence for the survey, the intended audience and context for the survey, logistics for administration, how to score the questions, and how to analyze and interpret the data.