Building Capacity for Collective Evaluation across North Carolina Science Museums

The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences will partner with North Carolina State University to improve the evaluation skills of informal science education providers. The project team will create a community of practice for 54 science museums across North Carolina by implementing a series of regional professional development workshops. The workshops will be designed to create a shared sense of purpose for programming and evaluation, build capacity among science museum educators to evaluate their programs, and establish a set of common metrics and methodologies for the evaluation of informal science learning across the state. The project will produce a practitioner's guide that will describe the collaborative process, lessons learned, and ways other informal science organizations can use identified evaluation goals and metrics.