NRES Online M.S. Blog

Advisor: Piper Hodson

Abstract:
With the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Forest Preserves of Cook County (FPCC) pivoted from in-person environmental education programming to all virtual. The FPCC wanted to know how effectively these new programs connected their audience to nature. Soledad met this need by using their capstone internship to perform a formative evaluation of FPCC virtual school programs. Due to a low response rate to student and teacher surveys, however, the evaluator was unable to complete their evaluation. To identify flaws in the evaluation design that contributed to the low response rate, the evaluator interviewed FPCC staff and evaluation professionals. The predominant issues they found related to the COVID-19 pandemic, too-broad research objectives, the data collection strategy, and lack of staff buy-in. Soledad synthesizes these missteps to outline recommendations for future FPCC evaluations and concludes with a reflection on the capstone internship’s impacts on their academic and professional goals.

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