Native bees of Texas: Evaluating a public engagement initiative in Central Texas

Public interest in native bee identification, ecology, and conservation has grown in the last decade in response to bee conservation initiatives and public engagement programs. Despite a heightened interest, there are few publicly available native bee courses and little information on how participants benefit from them. We designed the ‘Native Bees of Texas’ course for the general public and implemented it at The University of Texas at Austin Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. In October of 2018 and 2019, we taught 41 Central Texas participants visual identification skills, ecology, and conservation of native bees in an active learning environment with slide-based lectures, indoor and outdoor practicum activities, and printed material. We evaluated course efficacy and participant learning outcomes with pre and post course tests, surveys, and in-class observations by educational evaluators. Overall, test score means increased significantly from pre to post course; 60% (SE 0.05) to 87% (SE 0.03)(p < 0.009) in 2018 and 64% (SE 0.04) to 87% (SE 0.02)(p < 0.000) in 2019; with greater increases in ecological knowledge than identification skills of native bees. Accordingly, participants expressed confidence in their gains in ecological and conservation knowledge (4.50 and 4.62 out of 5 in 2018 and 2019, respectively), and felt the primary learning objectives were met (4.44 and 4.41 out of 5 in 2018 and 2019, respectively). Assessment results provided evidence that the course successfully taught non-scientists basic native bee identification, ecology, and conservation. Furthermore, our systematic educational evaluation will serve as a baseline for future courses of this kind.