Abstract

People’s attitudes influence the nature of their interactions with wildlife and support for conservation. Globally, many environmental education programs seek to influence children’s attitudes toward wildlife and the environment. Understanding these attitudes requires assessment tools that are appropriate to the context and culture. However, most tools have been developed and used in Western developed countries, making their effectiveness elsewhere questionable. The Wild Shaale environmental education program was launched in 2018 in rural India with the goal of enhancing children’s positive attitudes toward wildlife. To design an evaluation for Wild Shaale, we tested five tools to assess children’s attitudes toward wildlife with 1772 students in 56 rural schools. Here, we discuss the challenges encountered while testing these tools and report which tools are likely to be valid measures of variation in children’s attitudes and which may be useful for program evaluation. We provide recommendations for assessing children’s attitudes in similar contexts.

摘要

人们的态度会影响他们与野生动物互动的性质以及对保护的支持。在全球范围内，许多环境教育计划试图影响儿童对野生动物和环境的态度。理解这些态度需要适合环境和文化的评估工具。然而，大多数工具都是在西方发达国家开发和使用的，这使得它们在其他地方的有效性值得怀疑。Wild Shaale 环境教育计划于 2018 年在印度农村启动，旨在提高儿童对野生动物的积极态度。为了设计对 Wild Shaale 的评估，我们对 56 所农村学校的 1772 名学生测试了五种工具来评估儿童对野生动物的态度。这里，我们讨论了在测试这些工具时遇到的挑战，并报告了哪些工具可能是衡量儿童态度变化的有效方法，哪些工具可能对项目评估有用。我们提供了评估儿童在类似情况下的态度的建议。