Rethinking Assessments in Nature Education: The Journey Behind NEAF
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
-by Tanaya Rele
How do we assess our work as nature educators? Are there tools that can help us do this meaningfully? And perhaps the most unsettling question of all, how do we even know if our interventions are working?
Assessments are important! That is what we and almost every nature educator we interacted with believe. At Nature Classrooms, conversations about assessments were always somewhere in the background. Sometimes emerging during formal meetings, sometimes post workshops, and sometimes during casual reflections on the work we were doing.
The questions kept repeating themselves. How do we assess our work as nature educators?Are there tools that can help us do this meaningfully? And perhaps the most unsettling question of all, how do we even know if our interventions are working?
Assessments help us understand whether learners are gaining something meaningful and, importantly, whether our nature education programmes are designed effectively. But anyone who has tried to conduct them knows how demanding they can be. Assessments take time (and mind space). They require documentation, response sheets, and often a fair amount of data analysis. Certainly important, but with a flipside of quickly turning into something overwhelming. Overwhelming not for practitioners alone but also for the learners who attempt them.
While these questions and dilemmas were looming around, surfacing in conversations and sometimes yielding potential ideas for a new project, the Inlaks Small Grants Programme issued a call for proposals. We thought, why not apply and attempt to actually build something around these never ending questions?
That was the beginning of what eventually became the Nature Education Assessment Framework (NEAF).
In the early stages, we imagined NEAF quite simply as a toolkit. A guide containing easy-to-use tools that practitioners could use to assess their programmes. But once we started conversing with educators, that idea began to transform. We spoke with nature educators who had been working in this field for decades, and to those who had only recently started their careers in nature education. Despite their varying levels of experience, one thing was consistent, almost everyone agreed that assessments were essential. Many educators also expressed something interesting. They wanted ways to assess themselves and their own practices. Something reflective that could help them examine their programmes more thoughtfully. At the same time, almost everyone described assessments as tedious and overwhelming. Much of this had to do with the heavy reliance on data interpretation and analysis.
While these conversations continued, I simultaneously began exploring literature to see what kinds of assessment tools already exist. What I discovered was useful but also seemed to reveal a gap. Many of the tools that I encountered were also rooted in the Global North. They were thoughtful and rigorous, but I often wondered how well they translated into the socio-ecological realities in India. I also came across studies and assessments done in the nature education space in India. They were definitely helpful and gave direction to my cluttered thoughts, yet, something seemed to be missing!
This highlighted an important gap. Many aspects of nature education such as curiosity, emotional connections with nature, shifts in attitudes or behaviour are deeply qualitative experiences. Yet, they are often the hardest to capture through conventional assessments. Conventional assessments, focuses largely on knowledge gain, and sometimes tends to overlook how knowledge and attitudes can be shaped differently. An assessment of one cannot be the measure of the other.
Gradually, the idea of a toolkit began to evolve. Instead of simply designing tools, we began visualising NEAF as something closer to a practitioner’s guide. It organically started shaping itself as a framework that could help educators think about assessment in ways that were reflective, flexible, and adaptable to their contexts.
One of the early decisions we made was that assessments should consider three broad areas: knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours since educational interventions often influence all three. But that decision opened up an entirely new set of questions. How honestly can we capture attitudes and perceptions? How do we ensure that our own biases do not influence interpretation? Can behaviours truly be assessed in meaningful ways? Another question stayed with me throughout the process: how do we account for the knowledge and experiences learners already bring with them?
Children do not enter programmes as blank slates. They come with relationships with nature shaped by their families, communities, and everyday experiences with the spaces they engage with and occupy. If we observe shifts in their knowledge, attitudes, or behaviours, how can we know whether those shifts emerged from the programme itself or from other interactions in their lives?
These questions often surfaced during the design process. When the journey began, the idea was much simpler. We were trying to answer a set of questions that seemed relevant and important in our work as nature educators. As the xproject unfolded, these questions led us to far more complex questions and reflections than we had imagined. There were many moments of doubt along the way as well. I often found myself wondering whether I had the experience to build something like this, or whether we were overcomplicating a problem that probably isn’t perceived as one. Questions of positionality surfaced frequently too. Who was I to design a framework in a space where many practitioners had been working in for decades? Will my own biases affect the way I design tools? Are they really going to capture what I believe they should ? Are we adding to an already overburdened system?
What helped maintain the momentum was the methodology we adopted. The process was deliberately iterative. We design the tools, trial them, ask for feedback, review, refine, and trial again! There were many iterations of the framework. Many moments where I wondered whether we were missing something important, overestimating certain aspects, or underestimating them. Each round revealed something new. Some tools worked well. Others needed rethinking. But with every iteration, the framework became more grounded in real contexts. Gradually, NEAF moved away from being a one-size-fits-all model and began to take shape as something practitioners could adapt according to their contexts.
One of the most memorable moments in this journey happened during the trials with Earth Focus Foundation in Kanha, Madhya Pradesh. It was also my first time testing NEAF tools directly on the ground with students. One of the tools we were trying out was called Feelings Towards Nature. Students were shown images of animals, birds, plants, and landscapes and asked to respond to them.
What struck me most was how expressive the students became during this activity. They were animated, curious, and emotionally engaged with what they were seeing. They spoke freely, reacted strongly to the images, and shared their thoughts with enthusiasm. At some point I realised that it didn’t feel like they were participating in an assessment at all! Assessments can also be fun if we want them to be!
Of course, not everything worked perfectly during the trials. Some tools needed refinement. But that was exactly the purpose of the trials, to reveal what worked, what didn’t, and where the framework needed strengthening. Another important learning came during trials with students in Gujarat. Initially, the students seemed less engaged with the assessment activities. I wondered whether it was because we were new to them or whether the activities themselves felt too heavy. But conversations with the Earth Focus education team revealed something important. Many of the students were first-generation formal education learners and were not entirely comfortable with reading and writing tasks. The challenge was not the assessment itself but the way the tool was being used and how it was being facilitated.
This pushed us to rethink how the tools could be implemented and to make it more inclusive. We began exploring variations in how activities could be conducted, adding facilitator notes, guiding prompts, and warm-up exercises. The aim was to ensure that assessments felt accessible and welcoming rather than intimidating.
Slowly, NEAF began to take shape not as a rigid instrument but as a guided framework that practitioners could adapt according to their contexts. As NEAF becomes available for practitioners, the hope is not for it to be seen as just another assessment tool. Instead, NEAF should be considered a guiding reference which nature educators can interpret, adapt, and reshape according to the needs of their learners and programmes. More importantly, I hope that NEAF encourages a shift in how we think about and interpret assessments in nature education.
The hope is that these assessment exercises and tools can become spaces for reflection, peer learning, experience sharing, and deeper understanding of our natural world. That they can feel welcoming and engaging rather than intimidating. And perhaps most importantly, assessments should not be about judging learners alone. They can also help us reflect on our own practices as educators. Assessments in that sense are less about measuring outcomes and more about helping us learn how to do our work better.
In the last two years, what began as a search for assessment tools slowly turned into a journey of conversations, field trials, iterations, and reflection. Somewhere along the way, the complex questions that would linger in our minds gave rise to the idea of a simple toolkit which has now evolved into what we call - the Nature Education Assessment Framework (NEAF).
Image credits- Tanaya Rele, Vaibhavi
Written by : Tanaya Rele, Manager (Research, Resources, Training), Nature Classrooms
If you are an educator looking to engage with articles and opinion pieces on nature education and pedagogy, a student looking to explore discourses in nature education, or just curious about these things - here's a curated list of essential readings available online.
Comments