Measure Progress in Five Minutes

Got 5 minutes? You have time to check your impact!

In the environmental and sustainability fields, getting someone to actually change their behavior is often the end-goal. We want to promote driving less, supporting a certain candidate, or rallying your community to change. The process of building these behaviors is known as environmental literacy.

Rachel engages in environmental behavior: harvesting local food - cherries!

Environmental literacy is the goal of most education classes or programs focused on the environment or sustainability. The programs want participants to know more, care more, have the skills to act, and then actually do something.

But, our attempts at education and outreach, while tried and true, can often be routine. So routine, its like laundry.

Here me out.

Like so many of us trying to get a stain out of a shirt, we assume that our favorite methods will work (pre-soaking, doubling the detergent, dousing it in vinegar, tossing salt over your shoulder and spinning around twice). We do our aforementioned salt throwing, chuck the washed shirt in the dryer without checking, and viola set in the stain forever. We then have to live with the stubborn stain or invest much more time, effort, and cash to fix.

Classes or programs that run without evaluation are like those that toss the shirt into the dryer without checking. While the wash may have done something (maybe the shirt smells a lot better), it may not have been what was intended. Or, it may have done it less effectively than you'd hoped (the stain is less colorful, but still there). Or, maybe you feel better (throwing salt is therapeutic), but the participants don't.

Ok, yes, this laundry analogy is over-simplifying things. A mustard stain is not equivalent to a lesson on lead water pollution. But it points out something important: not checking our efforts will cost us more in the long run.

When it comes to sustainability and the environment, these costs are all the more serious.

So, how to address this?

I am passionate about helping communities understand how things are going in a way that is fast, easy, and effective. That is one of the reasons my co-authors and I developed a short, yet effective, tool to measure environmental literacy for young people in middle and high school. You can read all the science behind making sure its valid and reliable here.

The Environmental Literacy Instrument for Adolescents takes 5 to 10 minutes. It can be taken on paper or online. It works for people around the ages of 10 to 19. It checks the environmental literacy of your participants. And, it measures what we want it to measure:

Do people know enough, care enough, have the skills to act, and plan to actually do something to help our environmental community?

If you're interested in answering that question, you can access the free tool below. Drop a note and let me know what you think!

Environmental Literacy Tool

Scoring Guide