What Is the Impact of the Impact Monster? Evaluating Environmental Education Programs

Article Middle School 1 Classroom Period Recreation

One job of wilderness managers is to teach people how to behave when they visit a wilderness area. One of the ways students learn about how to behave when they visit a wilderness area is through a special skit. The skit is called the Impact Monster Skit. The scientists in this study wanted to evaluate the effectiveness of the Impact Monster Skit.

A FACTivity is included with the article in the FACTivity tab below and as a separate pdf in the Activities tab.

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Olympic Winter Games - Vol. 2 No. 2

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Standards addressed in this Article:

Social Studies Standards

Civic Ideals and Practices
Culture
People, Places, and Environments
Time, Continuity, and Change

Note To Educators

The Forest Service's Mission

The Forest Service’s mission is to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the Nation’s forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations. For more than 100 years, our motto has been “caring for the land and serving people.” The Forest Service, an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), recognizes its responsibility to be engaged in efforts to connect youth to nature and to promote the development of science-based conservation education programs and materials nationwide.

What Is the Natural Inquirer?

Natural Inquirer is a science education resource journal to be used by students in grade 6 and up. Natural Inquirer contains articles describing environmental and natural resource research conducted by Forest Service scientists and their cooperators. These scientific journal articles have been reformatted to meet the needs of middle school students. The articles are easy to understand, are aesthetically pleasing to the eye, contain glossaries, and include hands-on activities. The goal of Natural Inquirer is to stimulate critical reading and thinking about scientific inquiry and investigation while teaching about ecology, the natural environment, and natural resources.

Natural Inquirer bee sitting at a desk with paper and pencil

Meet the Scientists

Introduces students to the scientists who did the research. This section may be used in a discussion about careers in science.
What Kinds of Scientist Did This Research?

Introduces students to the scientific disciplines of the scientists who conducted the research.
Thinking About Science

Introduces something new about the scientific process, such as a scientific habit of mind or procedures used in scientific studies.
Thinking About the Environment

Introduces the environmental topic being addressed in the research.
Introduction

Introduces the problem or question that the research addresses.
Method

Describes the method the scientists used to collect and analyze their data.
Findings & Discussion

Describes the results of the analysis. Addresses the findings and places them into the context of the original problem or question.
Reflection Section

Presents questions aimed at stimulating critical thinking about what has been read or predicting what might be presented in the next section. These questions are placed at the end of each of the main article sections.
Number Crunches

Presents an easy math problem related to the research.
Glossary

Defines potentially new scientific or other terms to students. The first occurrence of a glossary word is bold in the text.
Citation

Gives the original article citation with an internet link to the original article.
FACTivity

Presents a hands-on activity that emphasizes something presented in the article.

Science Education Standards

You will find a listing of education standards which are addressed by each article at the back of each publication and on our website.

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Education Files

In this FACTivity, you will conduct your own evaluation of an educational resource – a Natural Inquirer (or Investi-gator) article! You will tabulate the results of your survey and create a table or pie chart with your results.

Materials:

A Natural Inquirer or Invest-gator article (for each survey participant)
A copy of the student evaluation form (for each survey participant) (included)

Method:

You have learned how important it is to evaluate education programs. Now you will have a chance to do it! You can either evaluate this article or another article from Natural Inquirer. All students in your class must evaluate the same article. Give every student a copy of the chosen article and a student evaluation form.

Once everyone has completed the form, it’s time to summarize the results. When you summarize, you take all of the information collected from everyone and reduce it to a single number.

Why do you think you need to reduce the responses into a single number? It would take a long time to present each student’s response to each question. Instead, you calculate a class summary for each question.

Begin with question #2. Ask a student volunteer to write the class’s responses on the blackboard. Count how many students answered each of the choices in question 2. Then, you will need to calculate the percentage of the whole class each choice represents. Divide the number of students responding to each question by the total number of students in the class.

You can calculate the percentages of each response with questions 2-9 and 11.

For example, if there are 25 students in your class and 11 of you said the article was very easy to understand, you will divide 11 by 25, or 25 into 11. The answer is .44, or 44 percent.

Some of the questions will have to be tabulated differently – questions 10 and 11.

You will not be able to do this kind of summary for question 10. Instead, you can list everyone’s response.

For question 11, how could you express everyone’s responses as percentages like the other questions?

You can make a table for each of the questions 2-9 and 11. See the example below.

A sample data table for entering the responses from question 2 on the student evaluation form. — This is a sample data table for the responses to question 2 on the student evaluation form. You can make a table like this for questions 2-9 and 11.

You can also create a pie chart for each. See the pie chart below.

Instructions for making a pie chart with an example at the bottom of the page. — These instructions are for creating a pie chart and refer to the data in Table 2 in "What Is the Impact of the Impact Monster?" These instructions can be used to make any pie chart.

After calculating the responses to these survey questions and considering your findings:

Do you think that the article was easy or hard for your classmates to understand?
Was it interesting or boring for your classmates?
Do you think your classmates learned something from the article? How do you know?
What other things can you say about the article, based on this evaluation?

Olympic Winter Games - Vol. 2 No. 2

FACTivity – What Is the Impact of the Impact Monster?