Convene
Connect researchers, faculty, evaluators, program leaders, and emerging scholars through conferences and discussion.
Conference information ↗Understanding Interventions
Understanding Interventions
Understanding and evaluating interventions is central to DePass’s work: bringing communities of scholarship and practice together around participation in science and science careers.
Director / Co-Director since 2007
A community organized
around a demanding question.
What makes an intervention effective? How can that knowledge improve the next effort?
Understanding Interventions began as a conference designed to connect research on broadening participation with the people implementing programs. Co-organized and led by DePass and founding co-chair Daryl Chubin, the work grew into conferences, a journal, and resources that support exchange across research, evaluation, and practice.
DePass has served as Publisher of the Understanding Interventions Journal since 2017. He served as Co-Director of the Louis Stokes Regional Center of Excellence for the Study of STEM Interventions from 2020 to 2024.
Visit Understanding Interventions ↗Publish
Provide a venue for work concerned with interventions, participation, and development in science.
Explore the journal ↗Find evidence
Use the UI Index to explore reports, articles, and evaluations relevant to the community’s questions.
Search the index ↗Inform practice
Consider what a finding means for program design, institutional conditions, and professional development.
Read the working note →Inside the community / 2023 conference archive
People doing the work.
UI Conference 2023
A conference film embedded in Understanding Interventions’ official 2023 archive.
Watch on YouTube ↗UI Conference 2023 · participant reflections
The participant-reflections film from the same conference archive.
Watch on YouTube ↗From scholarship to decisions
Evidence, with its
context intact.
Understanding an outcome requires attention to the participants, the setting, the program’s implementation, and the comparison available. Those questions connect intervention research to evaluation and institutional improvement.
DePass’s co-authored work on graduate recruitment, retention, and holistic admissions offers concrete examples of the questions this field investigates.
Read the publications →Related practice
Understanding and evaluating
interventions.
Through DePass Academic Consulting, that concern also informs work with institutions designing, implementing, and evaluating their own programs.
Explore the consulting practice ↗Connecting evidence with career development
Career Development
Intelligence
How do aspirations, exploration, development, and decisions connect with the pathways people pursue?
CDI brings six evidence domains into one framework for understanding those relationships. It connects my work in evaluation and human development with the practical questions facing learners, educators, and workforce organizations.
Explore the CDI framework
Aspirational · Exploration · Developmental
Decision · Alignment · Outcome