An excellent resource for program evaluation is the website My Environmental Education Research Assistant (MEERA). Developed by Michaela Zint at the University of Michigan with support from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Forest Service, MEERA includes both a step-by-step explanation of the evaluation process as well as a library of sample evaluations and additional resources.

As a graduate student at the University Michigan, John Cawood studied evaluation under professor Zint and helped support the MEERA website. In his role as Education Coordinator at the Chicago-based conservation organization Openlands, John has embedded evaluation into a number of urban environmental education programs.

The pages that follow walk through the steps of evaluation outlined by MEERA and share how John applied each step to the Chicago EE program Birds in My Neighborhood. Before digging into the evaluation process, watch this short video introduction to Birds in My Neighborhood produced by Openlands.

The text in the following pages has been adapted from http://meera.snre.umich.edu/.