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
