Evaluation of the Science Museum of Virginia’s Community-based Climate Change Resiliency Programs
Client: Science Museum of Virginia | Location: Richmond, VA | Funding: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
We led front-end, formative, and summative evaluations of the Science Museum of Virginia’s suite of climate change and resiliency programs.
OVERVIEW
Over three years, we evaluated the Science Museum of Virginia’s new suite of climate change and resiliency programs, beginning with gauging visitors’ baseline understandings of and associations with climate change and culminating with summative evaluation of five new public programs.
APPROACH
We designed a three-phase evaluation:
A front-end evaluation of visitors’ knowledge and perceptions of climate change, its causes, and their current resiliency behaviors
A formative evaluation of five climate programs to understand strengths and challenges to achieving intended outcomes with audiences
A summative evaluation of five climate programs (three repeated from the formative evaluation plus two new programs)
CLIENT TAKEAWAYS
From the front-end, to formative evaluation, to summative evaluation, the Science Museum of Virginia continuously applied what they learned from the evaluation reports and reflection workshops. In particular, the museum refined its climate and resiliency programs to meet visitors where they are in their knowledge about climate change and to infuse local impacts in a way that made the effects of climate change and potential resiliency actions more relevant to visitors.
Overall, summative results indicated that the programs evaluated were largely successful in achieving their intended outcomes and providing a complementary balance of climate science and resiliency. One area for continued growth for the museum is working to battle the sense of hopelessness that sometimes accompanies addressing a problem at the scale of climate change.
