Tips and Tricks

Welcome to Tips and Tricks, the newsletter’s section designed to give you rad resources and awesome advice to help you include evaluation in museum programming. Each newsletter will provide fun and easy methods, links to great articles or websites, and/or short “how to’s” to help you integrate evaluation into the work you do. 

Cool Idea

In order to understand if our audiences are “getting it” during a program, it’s useful to integrate formative assessment, a cousin of formative evaluation. Formative evaluation is used during a program’s implementation to understand where the program is working and where improvements may be needed. Formative assessment is used to gauge where your audiences are in their comprehension of program’s content. Formative assessment can influence your formative evaluation of a program—Did activities work as planned? Did the audience enjoy the activity? Did the audience understand how the content was delivered? Classroom teachers use formative assessment every day in schools.

Museum educators can easily incorporate formative assessment strategies into their programs to understand if audience’s are “getting it.” Check out some of the great online resources, such as Scholastic’s 25 Quick Formative Assessments and Edutopia’s Formative Assessment webpage. National Science Teacher’s Association’s Science Formative Assessment book, which can be adapted to other content areas.