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- what happens in schools?
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- developing services to include everyone
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- making the most of museums
Why Evaluate Learning in Museums
In order to develop and sustain any resources for schools you will need to evaluate (find the
value) before you begin, during development and at the end.
Evaluation can:
- give you evidence about how your project is meeting your aims and objectives
- encourage ongoing improvements in the project from the beginning
- act as an excellent tool for telling others about the great work you are doing and enable you to share what you have learned
- provide evidence of what your participants have learned
- help you, other members of the project team, and the participants, feel like they "own" the project - everyone will feel much more involved
- help develop relationships with your visitors
- help provide financial evidence of the benefits of undertaking learning events
- have a really important role in developing ideas and planning future projects
All of these act as an excellent tool for external reporting and accountability, especially to funders.
If you don't carry out evaluation you could:
- waste time
- waste money
- produce something that you can't change
- lose interest from your target audience
- lose a good opportunity to learn something useful
- lose an opportunity to tell people about the good work you are doing
- lose funding
To find out more about how to evaluate go to the next page, How to Evaluate.