Evaluation Toolkit Collection

The DLESE Evaluation Toolkit is an NSF-funded repository dedicated to the collection and distribution of materials to facilitate the evaluation of Earth science education teaching, programs, curricula, and other educational activities. This facilitation includes promoting collaboration between investigators and evaluators and feedback to community members on evaluation projects and concerns. This document describes the following elements: goals and intended audiences, collections policy, resource review, collection contacts, persistence plan, and additional information.

Goals

The goals of the Evaluation Toolkit and Community project are to:

• Establish a forum and community for evaluation dialogue within DLESE
• Provide a robust collection of evaluation resources useful for Earth systems educators
• Disseminate the resource through the DLESE infrastructure and through professional society workshops and proceedings.

Intended audience

The Evaluation Toolkit will support evaluation efforts of Earth science educators:

• K-12 teachers and administrators
• Higher education faculty
• Principal investigators of educational outreach and research projects and innovations

The Evaluation Toolkit will support evaluation by persons with a range of evaluation experience, from professional evaluators to first-time evaluators. A particular goal is to make first-time evaluators aware of ethical requirements when working with human subjects.

Collections policy

The scope of the Evaluation Toolkit is evaluation in Earth system education, with emphasis on building evaluation capacity within the geoscience education community. Resources should have a minimum of jargon, making them accessible to the widest possible audience. Evaluation Toolkit resources include general evaluation resources that communicate the principles that underlie all evaluation efforts, including evaluation of geoscience education; example tools and instruments; resources specific to science teaching and to teaching with technology; and resources specific to assessment of geoscience learning, including learning in foundation physical and life science concepts.

The Evaluation Toolkit will support evaluators' efforts in various settings, including:

• Assessment of students' learning in classroom, outreach, and research activities
• Evaluation of educational programs and projects, such as outreach, curriculum revision, and web-based learning materials development
• Evaluation in formal and informal settings (for example, classroom, museum, home schooling, etc.)

The Evaluation Toolkit will support a range of evaluation activities, including:

• Learning about evaluation, including learning about the ethics of working with human subjects
• Writing an evaluation plan for a project or a proposal
• Conducting evaluation
• Helping educators choose an evaluator through learning about evaluation and helping persons to find evaluators available for their projects

The types of materials to be collected include:

• Example consent forms and human research guidelines
• Guidelines, checklists and discussion of expectations when working with professional evaluators
• Assessments (standardized tests, instructional materials with built-in assessment, performance assessment, use of portfolio assessments, etc.)
• Tools and instruments (surveys, questionnaires, observation rubrics, and other readily available tools for conducting Earth science evaluation)
• Example evaluation plans from geoscience education projects
• Example evaluation reports from geoscience education projects
• Support for learning methods of data collection, analysis, and reporting

Peer review criteria

The Evaluation Toolkit resources are to be peer reviewed using criteria established by the Evaluation Toolkit development team and advisory board.  Review the draft criteria under consideration.

Quality assurance

Quality assurance in the metadata of this collection has been conducted by the DLESE Program Center. Quality assurance heretofore will be conducted initially by the Evaluation Toolkit staff for new resources and quarterly for the whole collection.

Persistence plan

The Evaluation Toolkit website will be maintained through funding to be available through June, 2006.

Metadata use

Copyright on the metadata used in the Evaluation Toolkit is held by the University of Colorado. Metadata use and redistribution is encouraged and permissible under DLESE guidelines.

Last updated: 2005-03-25
Maintained by: Katy Ginger & Shelley Olds (support@dlese.org), DLESE Metadata

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