Authors
Brian Grant Peterson, Nicole Marie Packard, Erin Marie McConnaghy, Michael Robert Clark
Sponsor
Zoos Victoria
Advisors
David Edward Szkutak, Paul W. Davis, Joan B. Szkutak
Term
October – December 2015
Abstract
Zoos Victoria recently introduced a new educational program, Education for Conservation (EfC), to teach visiting students about conservation practices. Our goal was to create a set of efficient tools to assess the effectiveness of EfC from the perspectives of Zoo educators, schoolteachers, and students, because they had no previous form of standardized evaluation. We developed focus groups and self-reflection journals to gauge educator satisfaction, surveys to measure teacher expectations, student pre-visit and on-site activities to assess student engagement, and observation sheets to simultaneously evaluate the engagement of all three groups. The implementation of these tested tools provides Zoos Victoria with a means to continually evaluate and improve the EfC program.
Final Report