Evaluation: "How do we know we are doing a good job?"

Accountability is BIG for NSF
Pay attention!
Develop visitor surveys with more open ended questions
Consider formative versus summative evaluations
Survey Questions should be tied to program/exhibit goals
Find out what do visitors want?
Ask about what visitors enjoyed, learned
Provide incentives to participate in surveys and other evaluations
Immediate feedback is important
Online surveys can also be helpful – check out surveymonkey.com to create free surveys, that are easy to make and easy to use.
Take advantage of visitor self-reporting
Consider using follow-up to surveys of classes and groups.
Establish follow-up on training of university volunteers
Establish frameworks for evaluation that can be shared with other centers ands institutions, e.g. Insci.org, Informalscience.org