Beyond counting heads : building capacity for measuring the impacts of environmental education
2006
Morford, Shawn R., Forest Research Extension Partnership, 506 West Burnside Road, Victoria, British Columbia V8Z 1M5 (Canada)
Environmental education is an intervention designed to induce desired changes in targeted audiences. Educators aim to increase knowledge and skills, affect attitudes, and inspire new aspirations or behaviours in their audiences. It is assumed that environmental education programmes will ultimately lead to increased longer-term impacts such as environmental protection and improved or maintained quality of life. Increasingly, funders are requiring educators to demonstrate the link between educational activities and changed behaviours and longer-term impacts. Many organisations across the globe have historically shown programme impacts based on relatively easier-to-measure outputs such as number of activities and participants rather on than the outcomes they are aiming to achieve, but this is increasingly no longer a luxury. Adapting frameworks developed for environmental education as well as evaluation tools commonly used in the extension educati on field in North America, environmental education organisations can plan activities that link directly to observable changes that can be reported to funders. Evaluation model such as Bennett's Hierarchy can be used to focus plans, improve evaluations, and provide a common evaluation language within the field of environmental education.
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