Advancing Water Resources Management and Research

INDEX

Abstract
Introduction
The Role of Water Resources Education
Ten Steps to Effective Programming
Understanding Educational Needs
Summary
References
Links

Abstract

Designing successful education campaigns presents a plethora of challenges to today's water resources educators. Not only must they consider audience characteristics and suitable ways to disseminate the information, they must be aware of the distinction between educational communication strategies and simple information transfer, public relations or program promotion. While education involves presenting people with the information they need to develop skills and understanding in order to make sound decisions, public relations and program promotion campaigns are designed to persuade to act in specific ways. Decades of communication and social marketing research show that programs specifically targeted toward audience needs are more likely to accomplish goals than more broad-based efforts. Water resource education programs are typically directed toward small geographically defined areas within particular hydrologic units, or watersheds. These targeted educational programs have three common goals: to inform, to persuade and to mobilize the target audience toward taking remedial actions. A successful strategy for achieving these goals typically includes 1) identifying program objectives and target audiences, 2) developing education plans geared toward audience wants/needs, and 3) evaluating the program's progress and results.

KEY TERMS: education, outreach, communication strategies.

Introduction

Education involves a communication strategy that includes a series of events designed to meet objectives that are linked to intended impacts on a target audience (Seevers et al., 1997). Educators working in the field of water resources management are constantly challenged by a broad range of environmental issues and program demands associated with reaching the citizens and groups affected by water resource problems. In water resource programs, education is often approached from a traditional outreach perspective, where information is distributed in order to help people form sound opinions and make appropriate decisions (van den Ban and Hawkins, 1996). Educators provide an understanding of the problem, outline various solutions and suggest the means for taking action, while also considering citizens' perspectives, values and needs (Wagenet, et. al., 1999). Educational programs, in this role, allow the individual to decide what or how specific actions will be taken.

The Role of Water Resources Education:
Adoption versus Program Promotion

Comprehensive education strategies comprise both a centralized information diffusion approach, where ideas flow from a central source, and a decentralized information diffusion approach, where target audiences share in the communication of ideas (Rogers, 1995). Persuasive or promotional campaigns are more often more centralized efforts built on a core of persuasive techniques and seek to achieve commercial, political or social ends. They are conscious, sustained communication strategies that use multiple messages over time to achieve clearly defined goals and actions (Pfau and Parrott, 1993). This may run counter to the purpose, processes and goals of education programs. The challenge for water resource educators is to develop programs that inform while encouraging independent thought and locally led decision making, but also put just enough emphasis on program promotion to stimulate public interest (see Figure 1).

Often, what passes for educational programming really leans more toward simple information transfer or public relations. A review of 41 Wisconsin Priority Watershed plans showed that most had a very limited scope on education. Thirty-seven of the projects viewed education primarily as information dissemination, meant to inform the public about the project and its goals, or in a general way about environmental problems and solutions. Only four of the project plans outlined education and outreach activities specifically aimed at empowering people to adopt practices or change their behavior to reduce water resource problems (Shepard, 1999).

Elements of an Education Campaign:
Ten Steps to Effective Programming

Developing effective educational communication strategies requires careful consideration of target audiences, their information needs and how best to deliver that information; that is, matching the recipient with the message with the medium. Combining the experiences of local environmental educators with research results, such as those form the previously mentioned Wisconsin watershed study, has resulted in these recommended principles for strengthening education programs:

Make a commitment to educational programming.
With constraints on both staff workloads and project dollars, education is sometimes relegated to the lower rungs of the priority ladder. Often, the responsibility for educational programming falls to an already busy staff person. Making a commitment means more than just assigning duties. It requires devoting staff time and dollars to the effort, as well as providing training and professional development opportunities for project staff.

Understand local needs and encourage community interaction.
Look for general trends in community consensus about problems and possible solutions, keeping in mind the differences among stakeholders. This requires an extensive analysis of what is or is not occurring in the target audiences.

Work with citizens and other stakeholders to plan programs that address their specific informational, social and environmental needs and capabilities.
Program planners may harbor erroneous assumptions about how and why the public acts on certain issues. Interaction and compromise with the target audience is critical when devising an education strategy.

Set specific, measurable objectives for education programs.
General objectives, such as raising awareness of water quality problems are vague and difficult to measure. Looking at behavior-oriented objectives, such as increasing the number of builders using silt fences or rural landowners installing vegetative buffers along streambanks, focuses limited program resources and provides specific evidence of program effectiveness.

Consider the difference between education, promotion and propaganda.
Watershed managers must provide the target audience with the information they need in order to adopt environmentally and socially acceptable behaviors and practices. This is distinct from the conscious, sustained communication efforts of program promotion, which are meant to achieve specific and definite commercial, political or social results through persuasive techniques.

Make use of multiple communication channels.
People prefer and trust different types of information sources. It is important to understand your audience's preferences in order to deliver your messages effectively.

Recognize the challenges of holistic programs.
It is sometimes difficult for target audiences to see the relationships among a broad range of environmental issues. Program planners and technical experts may see these linkages much more clearly and must develop strategies to connect these issues with a chain of educational events and sustained messages.

Consider the message content and then the delivery method.
Programs based on a detailed knowledge of audience needs will identify specific message content first and the best method for delivering the message will follow. Selecting the right delivery method requires and understanding of the target audience's media preferences and usage patterns.

Have an evaluation plan.
Evaluation is an often-neglected part of education programming. However, in order to know whether or not a strategy is effective, it is necessary to evaluate a program before, during and after its implementation. Without these evaluations, educators can't know what is working and what is not, critical knowledge for designing future education programs.

Keep the program active.
Once a program has resulted in positive actions or behavior changes, it is important to reinforce those changes over time. Rogers (1995) points to the need for continued reinforcement and self-evaluation by individuals to affirm that a new behavior is still worthwhile and not causing unforeseen negative consequences (O'Keefe and Shepard, 1999).

Common Approaches to Understanding Educational Needs

Educational programs should be based on a quantifiable understanding of the target audience. While intuitive assumptions can be important, superficial conjecture about what is, or is not, occurring can be detrimental to the effectiveness of the educational program. There are numerous techniques and tools when it comes to assessing audiences, understanding their needs and evaluating program impacts. For water resources educational programs there are three dominate theories pertaining to understanding audience needs and how those needs have been met in the contest of program evaluation. Each should be considered part of initial program planning. Assessing audience needs and evaluating impact isn't an after-thought, rather it should be given equal levels of emphasis as discussing how the program will be implemented (Cronbach, 1982).

Formative Evaluation Techniques
These evaluations are aimed at providing information for program planning, improvement, modification and management. Formative evaluations often focus on identifying audience needs and/or issues, problems, behaviors, etc. that a water resources program should address. When done at the beginning of a project, they form the basis for why and how the project proceeds and especially in identifying the target audience (Shadish, Cook and Leviton, 1991; Cronbach and Snow, 1977). Formative evaluation techniques provide a baseline of information from which changes can be monitored.

Program Monitoring Techniques
These techniques vary widely from periodic checks of compliance with policy to routine tracking of service delivered to counting the number of clients. These approaches are more often associated with program evaluation and more specifically fit into a category of approaches used to audit performance activities (Chelimsky and Shadish, 1997). They regularly include post-workshop and program participant surveys that focus on who attended and how they felt about the program they attended (Van den Ban and Hawkins, 1996; and Bennett and Rockwell, 1995). They may also include attendance tracking of how many people attended or how much money was spent on the activity. Program monitoring commonly focuses on what when into the implementation of a program.

Summative Evaluation Techniques
These efforts are aimed at determining program results and effectiveness, especially for the purpose of making major decisions about program continuation, expansion, redirection and/or funding. This type of evaluation often focuses on what happened as a result of the program. Such evaluation usually requires data from multiple points in time so that changes can be measured. As the title suggests, summative evaluations are done at the end of a project and focus on impacts (Shadish, Cook and Leviton, 1991; Campbell, 1984; and Patton, 1982). They may incorporate formative evaluation principles as part of a comprehensive evaluation plan, however they differ from formative evaluation because the results are almost exclusively used at the end of program and not used in the initial design or implementation.

Summary

Water resource educators have long recognized that both early planning and formative assessment of audience needs are critical to success. The basic components to successful outreach include the setting of measurable objectives, developing a communication strategy to address target audiences and their needs, and careful attention to evaluating program impacts. In a recent study of Wisconsin's watershed education efforts, over 90 percent of the projects viewed watershed education primarily as information dissemination, to inform local citizens about the project and its goals or to provide very general information about how to gain access to project services such as financial assistance. Only 10 percent of the projects emphasized education and outreach activities as part of more comprehensive strategies that empowered target audiences to adopt practices and to make changes in their lives or take actions to protection water quality (Shepard, 2000).

The challenge facing water resources educators is to develop a program strategy that goes beyond raising general citizen awareness of problems. A high percentage of the citizenry is already aware of the problems (Shepard and O'Keefe, 1999), but they need more sophisticated, detailed and action-oriented messages designed to stimulate behavior changes within target populations.

References

Bennett, Claude and Kay Rockwell. 1995. Targeting Outcomes of Programs (TOP): An Integrated Approach to Planning and Evaluation. Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Agricultural, Cooperative States Research, Education and Extension Service publication.

Campbell, D.T. 1984. Can we be scientific in applied social science? In R.F. Connor, D.G. Altman, and C. Jackson (eds.), Evaluation studies review annual. Volume 9. Beverly Hills, California: Sage.

Chelimsky, Eleanor and William R. Shadish. 1997. Evaluation for The 21^st Century. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage.

Cronbach, Lee J. 1982. Designing Evaluations of Educational and Social Programs. San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass Incorporated Publishes.

Cronbach, L.J. & Snow, R.E. 1977. Aptitudes and instructional methods: A handbook for research on interactions. New York: Irvington.

O'Keefe, Garrett J. and Robin L. Shepard. 1999. The Challenges of Environmental Public Information and Action Programs. Proceedings of the Fifth Biennial Conference on Communication and Environment. Flagstaff, Arizona: Northern Arizona University. July 24-27, 1999.

Patton, Michael Quinn. 1982. Practical Evaluation. Newbury Park, California: Sage.

Pfau, M. and R. Parrott. 1993. Persuasive Communication Campaigns. Needham Heights, Massachusetts: Allyn and Bacon.
Rogers, E.M. 1995. The Diffusion of Innovations. (4^th ed.) New York, New York: Free Press.

Seevers, B., D. Graham, J. Gamon and N. Conklin. 1997. Education Through Cooperative Extension. Albany, New York: Delmar Publishers.

Shaddish, William R., Thomas D. Cook and Laura C. Leviton. 1991. Foundations of Program Evaluation. Newbury Park, California: Sage.

Shepard, Robin. 2000. Watershed Education Strategies: Are There Methods to the Madness? Watershed Protection Techniques. (In Process).

Shepard, R. and G. O'Keefe. 1999. Water Resource Program - How Target Audiences Differ. Proceedings of the Sixth National Watershed Conference. Austin, Texas: National Watershed Coalition. May 16-19, 1999 (In Process).

Van den Ban, A.W. and H.S. Hawkins. 1996. Agricultural Extension (second Edition). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell Science Ltd.

Wagenet, L.P., M.J Pfeffer, H.D. Sutphin and J.M. Stycos. 1999. Adult Education and Watershed Knowledge in Upstate New York. Journal of American Water Resources Association. 35(3): 609-21.

Robin Shepard
Wisconsin-Extension Water Quality Coordinator and Assistant Professor of Natural Resources
Department of Life Sciences Communication
University of Wisconsin-Madison
rlshepar@facstaff.wisc.edu
 
 

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