Methods Library

This tool is a reflection question that can help participants consider what they felt during a program. It can be formatted as a journal prompt or exit slip. Have participants say or write down their responses to the following question to assess attachment to place:
When I spend time in waterways and trails near my home, I feel…

This tool is a short series of 15 prompting questions to help environmental educators reflect on their program and their program development process. There are four categories of questions that are based on an understanding of how people learn.

This survey measures attitudes about efficacy about acting to address climate change. It can be helpful for programs educating about climate change to determine if the curriculum is effectively addressing attitudes. 

This survey can be used to assess the degree of hope present in high school students with respect to climate change. It captures an individual’s ability to move from despair or helplessness to optimism and efficacy, and how much they believe that they and society can solve problems caused by climate change.

This tool is useful for assessing children’s feelings about the natural world and their connection to nature. 

This is a self-evaluation tool that is designed to support programs in becoming more culturally responsive. The goal is to use this to engage in reflection and discussion with your staff and team members in order to understand whether your program(s) are inclusive and meaningful to all participants. The ultimate goal is that these team conversations will promote programmatic and organizational changes as needed, and lead to meaningful and positive experiences for participants.

Measuring interest in science and nature is one way to gauge participant engagement. Developing a high interest in science and nature is key to sustained learning for adults. This tool measures interest, which is defined by how much someone assigns personal relevance to a subject. 

Measuring interest in science and nature is one way to gauge participant engagement. Developing a high interest in science and nature is key to developing youth’s identity as a science learner, sustaining engagement in the subject, and gaining their interest in science careers. This tool measures interest, which is defined by how much someone assigns personal relevance to a subject.

The tool provides information about the type of motivation for doing and learning science in adult audiences; it is distinctly different from measuring an individual’s reason for participation. It is based on the understanding that motivation can range from intrinsic to extrinsic motivation. Choosing to participate in an activity may be because it makes an individual feel good (intrinsic), or it may be because it gains the respect of others (extrinsic). Motivation can be important to measure because it can drive behavior, such as someone choosing to volunteer for an environmental organization.

This survey is useful to measure a learner’s self-confidence in their ability to participate in activities for environmental action. It measures “an individual’s confidence in their ability to effectively address environmental concerns”.

This tool, the Draw-an-Ecosystem task, takes a qualitative approach to evaluation. Participants draw and label an ecosystem before and after a program to measure their change in environmental knowledge. 

The EE21 tool is used to measure outcomes for adolescent students engaged in environmental education programs with a focus on environmental literacy, 21st Century Skills and positive youth development. The 12 outcomes that the tool measures are enjoyment, place connection, learning, interest/motivation, 21st Century Skills, meaning/self-identity, self-efficacy, environmental attitudes, environmental behaviors, school behaviors, cooperation, and behavior change.

This tool has been used to measure youth’s attitudes toward animals during long-term programs at a zoo. It focuses on empathy by exploring perspective-taking, respect, and concern for animals. Empathy is an environmental attitude (outcome); developing empathy for animals can lead someone to take action on behalf of wildlife.

Environmental action measured by this survey is defined as intentional civic behaviors focused on systemic environmental issues and collective sustainability efforts. Examples include attending environmental community events or organizing a protest. 

This tool was designed to measure a variety of environmental attitudes, based on the multitude of attitude research that has occurred over decades. Because it was not designed to evaluate educational programs, consider whether and how to use the 12 scales that collectively offer 120 items. The scales capture both preservation and utilitarian attitudes, as well as broad perceptions about the natural environment.

The 12 scales include: 1) Enjoyment of nature 2) Support for interventionist conservation policies 3) Environmental movement activism 4) Conservation motivated by anthropocentric concern 5) Confidence in science and technology 6) Environmental threat 7) Altering nature 8) Personal conservation behavior 9) Human dominance over nature 10) Human utilization of nature 11) Ecocentric concern and 12) Support for population growth policies. 

Alternatively, there is one condensed scale developed by the researchers. It consists of 24 items which measure environmental attitudes more generally. 

This survey would be useful for EE teacher education and professional development programs working with preservice and in-service educators. The survey is used to assess whether teachers believe that they can teach EE effectively as it relates to EE teaching strategies and outcomes.

The Environmental Identity (EID) Scale can be used to measure a person’s environmental identity, or their sense of connection to the natural world. It can be helpful to assess a person’s environmental identity because this identity can have a broad and lasting influence on their behavior. The scale measures different aspects of a person’s environmental identity, including 1) self-identification (based on the extent and importance of an individual’s interaction with nature), 2) ideology (based on support for environmentally friendly lifestyle choices), and 3) positive emotions toward the environment (based on enjoyment obtained in nature).

This tool measures four components of environmental literacy: ecological knowledge, hope, behavior, and cognitive skills.

Focus groups can be used to explore participants' thoughts and experiences through group discussion. 

This tool is useful for programs that wish to self-evaluate their instructional resources and curriculum. It is not meant to rank or grade a program, not to increase the similarity or standardization of programs. The goal is conversations had in the process of using this tool will promote curriculum, program, and organizational changes as needed, and lead to a meaningful and positive experience for participants.

Interviews can be used to understand someone's impression or experience or learn more about their responses to other evaluation methods (like surveys). 

The Life Effectiveness Questionnaire (LEQ-H) is a survey used to measure personal development in several areas related to life effectiveness, or “a person’s demonstrated capacity to adapt, survive, and thrive” (Neill, 2008). The LEQ-H measures 8 domains, including time management, social competence, achievement motivation, intellectual flexibility, task leadership, emotional control, active initiative, and self confidence. The tool has been used to assess how outdoor education programs, including a variety of Outward Bound programs, influence a person’s self-perception of their skills in these areas.

Observations are a way to gather more information about how a program actually operates, particularly about processes. 

This set of qualitative tools intend to help programs/organizations understand how participants experience their program(s). Because of the qualitative nature of the tools, this approach lifts up participants’ voice in their own words, as opposed to a closed-ended survey tool. These tools help capture the nuance and story of participant experience and can be useful for both internal understanding and external reports to funders, boards, community members, and other key partners.

This scale is a very brief measure of positive youth development (PYD) as conceptualized by the Lerner and Lerner Five Cs model of PYD (Lerner et al., 2015). The Five Cs model emphasizes that thriving youth are characterized by five Cs (competence, confidence, connection, character and caring). Youth who exhibit the five Cs are more likely to contribute to their families, schools, and communities, thus developing the “sixth C”, which is contribution.  

This 13-item scale evaluates four key domains of pro-environmental behavior: 1) conservation lifestyle behaviors (household choices made by people that broadly influence environmental sustainability, like recycling or water conservation); 2) land stewardship behaviors (direct engagement with the environment, like tree planting or community science); 3) social environmentalism (actions that deal with social relationships, like participating with an environmental group or telling friends about environmental issues) and 4) environmental citizenship (actions related to environmental policy, like voting to support conservation efforts or donating money to conservation organizations).

This is a self-evaluation tool that is designed to support programs in becoming more inclusive and accessible, specifically for students with exceptional needs. The goal is to use this to engage in reflection and discussion with your staff and the community in order to co-develop improvement goals for high-quality, accessible and inclusive programming.

Surveys can be used to to quickly and/or easily get a lot of information from people.

This tool was designed to assess participants’ attitudes toward sustainability. It measures sustainability attitudes with a single score drawing from three domains (ecological, social, and economic).

Tests of knowledge can be used to determine an audience's current state of knowledge on an issue or understanding of a skill.