Education Program Evaluation at Multiple Primate Sanctuaries in Equatorial Africa

Abstract

The past decade has witnessed a shift in the role of primate sanctuaries in Africa from warehouses of salvaged animals to proactive conservation organizations. As part of this new role, the Pan African Sanctuary Alliance (PASA) has conducted annual training workshops for educators from member sanctuaries. These workshops have included content on program development, interpretive techniques, and evaluation techniques. Here we use meta-analytic techniques to examine data from the resulting education evaluation programs for trends in knowledge acquisition across PASA sanctuaries. Question content strongly impacted the evaluation results of the conservation education program. In addition, effect size and final performance scores were independent of one another and provide different perspectives as to the effectiveness of a conservation education program. These results highlight the importance of using both final performance scores and effect size measures in conservation education program evaluation. They also underscore the importance of evaluating knowledge transfer as part of the larger picture of evaluating pro-environmental behavior change and conservation impact.