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Changing Public Behavior > Themes > Evaluation

25 Total Findings

Adapt course design over time using multiple feedback methods.

Apply an evaluation strategy which helps educator to identify reasons and consequences for training outcomes.

Assess the democracy merits of collaborative public management by watershed partnerships in terms of: inclusiveness, representativeness, impartiality, transparency, deliberativeness, lawfulness, and empowerment.

Assure that intervention programs are relevant to perceived needs of farmers, relevant to cultural milieu of subgroups, and relevant to specific environmental needs:

Collaborate with local and county health officials, environmental and fishing group representatives, and interested local leaders in planning, conducting, and evaluating community outreach efforts.

Develop program design and content to adhere to guiding principles for boating, fishing, and aquatic stewardship education. The program:

Document information and outreach work to help improve ability to assess the relationship between outreach and outcomes and to exchange materials and knowledge with others. Evaluate progress toward clearly defined objectives.

Establish an evaluation system for collaborative watershed management that takes into consideration not only the quality and quantity of water resources, but also the quality and quantity of interorganizational alliances, capacity and knowledge of each partner organization.

Evaluate conservation professionals’ effectiveness in using models and demonstration tools and in their use of skills taught in the workshops

Evaluate program success by following up with household to check if problems have been corrected.

For rangeland owners and managers, evaluation surveys of training outcomes are an alternative to formal reporting about implementation of nonpoint source water programs that protects confidentiality while documenting program success.

In facilitating development of a watershed group, consider these potential indicators of success:

In watershed partnerships, negotiate indicators of evaluation among stakeholders. Watershed partnerships bring together multiple stakeholders with a diversity of goals, values and expectations, and each may bring different perspectives regarding what a ‘successful’ partnership entails, what type of scientific knowledge is ‘valid’, and how ‘progress’ should be measured.

Make time for continuous evaluation in order to best determine next steps (Ransley, 2003).

Make time for continuous evaluation in order to best determine next steps (Voege, 1998).

Provide clear information about goals and plans for land parcels. Provide regular feedback about how well goals and plans have been achieved.

Provide the following when focusing on environmentally responsible behavior:

Tell the story of the program and publicize impacts. Report outcomes to county commissioners, stakeholders, and partners.

Test effectiveness of education program delivery through comparison of changes in nitrate, nutrients and bacteria in runoff.

To assess customer satisfaction with community water conservation programs, consider evaluating: effectiveness in reducing water use; effectiveness of enforcement; fairness; overall satisfaction with the program; necessity of the water use restrictions; and necessity of the water use bans.

Track program changes through a comprehensive pre-treatment survey and follow up surveys. Assure that program resources actually reached targeted audiences.

Use a "water demand" mathematical model to provide feedback to citizens and to demonstrate the effect of community water conservation outreach programs. Maintain records describing which specific outreach programs were initiated to address which specific community environmental concerns and/or audiences in order to have sufficient data to interpret evaluation results.

Use a comparison strip to provide the farmer with opportunity to make their own evaluation of pros and cons of a new procedure

Use activities and evaluation to help identify barriers and verify success

When considering ecosystem outcomes from a collaborative watershed management process, develop evaluation criteria that can account for the influence of scale and better reflect the potential contributions of the watershed team to their broad, longterm vision for the watershed.


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