Description of the Public
Outreach Assessment Project

The Center for a Public Anthropology conducted an assessment of public outreach in anthropology’s doctoral programs during spring-summer, 2006. The project sought to provide a sense of how doctoral programs are ranked in respect to public outreach by their peers.

Public outreach was broadly defined as addressing social concerns in the world beyond the university. Two criteria were emphasized: programs that are focused on public issues and public outreach as well as the people -- that is, faculty members -- engaged in public outreach activities.

The programs included in this assessment were listed in the 1993 National Research Council’s (NRC’s) list of doctoral programs or, if relatively recent, have been in existence for at least ten years. (This is the same criteria used by the NRC..)

Participants in the assessment were randomly assigned four graduate departments to evaluate. They were presented with overviews of each department’s outreach efforts. The assessor was encouraged to explore the details behind these data. All the assessor needed do is click on an appropriate link and a new page opened up with additional information. This new page had additional links, which, if the assessor wished to investigate, lead to still more web pages (and links).

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