Evaluating education for biodiversity: A scoping review of practices and frameworks

Education and public engagement are increasingly recognized as essential levers for biodiversity conservation. Over the past decade, biodiversity-related education and engagement initiatives have expanded considerably, yet their evaluation remains fragmented and methodologically uneven. This diversity complicates assessments of effectiveness, comparability, and long-term conservation relevance. We conducted a scoping review of peer-reviewed empirical studies published between 2015 and 2025 to examine how evaluation practices are designed, implemented, and reported in biodiversity-related education and engagement initiatives. Following PRISMA-ScR guidelines, 74 articles were selected from the Web of Science Core Collection and analyzed in terms of implementation contexts, target publics, educational practices, evaluation objectives, methodologies, temporalities, reported outcomes, limitations, and levers. The review reveals a strong concentration of evaluations in formal education settings, primarily targeting children and young people. Objectives are largely structured around the knowledge–attitudes–behaviors (KAB) framework, with limited attention to competencies, empowerment, collective processes, or ecological outcomes. Most studies rely on short-term, self-reported quantitative measures, while longitudinal, qualitative, participatory, and process-oriented approaches remain underrepresented. Although experiential, place-based, creative, and participatory practices are identified as promising levers, their impacts are rarely assessed beyond immediate individual-level outcomes. Overall, the findings expose a structural tension between the diversity of biodiversity education practices and the absence of shared, integrative evaluation frameworks. Advancing evaluation in this field requires systemic, reflexive, and multi-scalar approaches linking individual learning, collective action, institutional change, and conservation outcomes. Such a shift is essential to strengthen the contribution of education to conservation and to support more robust, cumulative, and policy-relevant evidence.