EAGER: Building Tools for Creating Coherence Across Evaluations of Schoolyard LTER Programs

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For the past eleven years, the Division of Environmental Biology has provided supplemental funds to each of the 26 Long-Term Ecological Research sites to support the Schoolyard LTER. Each site designs their own The Schoolyard LTER program, which has fostered tremendous creativity in approaches but has made it challenging to draw general conclusions about the Schoolyard LTER program as a whole. The Learning Partnership will develop and pilot test a technological infrastructure called the Learning Monitor to support drawing general conclusions about the program as a whole. The Learning Monitor will allow for evaluating the unique characteristics of each site and then aggregating the site specific results across the Schoolyard LTER network. The focus of this one-year effort will be building the infrastructure to measure the impact of the Schoolyard LTER programs on K-12 students and teachers. The resulting infrastructure will provide a searchable catalog of LTER programs that can be maintained by each site as well as a suite of pilot-tested instruments. The sites would be able to manage the data collection for their programs. This proof of concept could support future work to implement a full-scale evaluation of the Schoolyard program, enhance the capabilities of generating ad hoc reports about individual sites and the network as a whole, and develop tools for incorporating the unique aspects of LTER research into performance assessment questions.