KAEE’s 48th Annual Conference | Forging Paths for Environmental Education: Community, Conversations, and Creativity
Title Sponsor: Morehead State University | Drs. Ernst and Sara Lane Volgenau College of Education
Land Acknowledgement Morehead State University and the surrounding area are located on the traditional lands of the Yuchee, Shawnee, and Eastern Band of Cherokee. Indigenous peoples have lived on the land we now call Kentucky for over 12,000 years. We want to acknowledge the deep history of this land and the people who still live here today. To learn more about this land and the land you call home, visit native-land.ca.
Nonformal education sites offer enriching educational experiences for students. The McDowell Farm School (MFS) exemplifies this by providing students with immersive encounters in a working farm environment. Despite their educational value, many nonformal education sites lack sufficient evidence of their impact. This session presents a research study aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of MFS programs on visiting students. By utilizing pre-visit/post-visit surveys and interviews, this study provides valuable insights into program efficacy and offers transferable evaluation methods for similar nonformal education programs. This session will explore the study’s methodology, findings, and implications to contribute to a deeper understanding of program evaluation in nonformal education contexts. This will be done using results and survey responses taken from the visit to the MFS that document the program’s impact on participants’ knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. By showcasing the positive impact of MFS on students and providing transferable evaluation methods, the session advances our understanding of the value of experiential learning beyond traditional educational settings. The research study utilized the EE21 survey as part of the program evaluation to document program impacts of the MPS on visiting students. The EE21 is available for other EE program providers to use. Researchers will share how the survey can be validated and used for program evaluations of conference attendees allowing them to include this valuable tool in their own program evaluations.
