The Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) seeks to improve the quantity, quality and efficiency of Earth System education through the community-based distribution of high quality educational resources. One means of promoting this mission is to provide tools to enable sound evaluation of geoscience education resources and projects as they are being developed and implemented. The DLESE Evaluation Toolkit is a developing Earth systems education evaluation resource that is grounded in the needs of Earth system educators, and that will provide a virtual home for a geoscience education evaluation community. The goals for the project are to provide a robust collection of evaluation resources useful for Earth systems educators, establish a forum and community for evaluation dialogue within DLESE, and to disseminate the resources through the DLESE infrastructure and through professional society workshops and proceedings.

In geoscience education, as in most endeavors, improvements are made by asking questions and acting upon information about successes and failures; project evaluation can be thought of as the systematic process of asking these questions and gathering the right information. The Evaluation Toolkit seeks to help principal investigators, teachers, and evaluators use the evaluation process to improve our projects and our field. We will describe the philosophy behind the project, the progress made in developing the Toolkit, share initial community feedback, and highlight opportunities for community involvement.