Comparing multi-criteria decision making models for evaluating environmental education programs

Abstract

Educators in the field of Environmental Education often have difficulty identifying and selecting programs that have the potential to best maximize needed resources to implement and achieve desired outcomes. This difficulty is, in part, due to their lack of expertise in evaluation knowledge and practice. The use of multi-criteria decision-making models in evaluating environmental education programs is new and, as a result, not many models have been used and tested in the specific domain. Comparisons of multi-criteria decision-making models have been implemented in various domains but not for environmental education programs’ evaluation. Therefore, we investigate the comparative performance of the SAW, WPM, TOPSIS, and PROMETHEE II models in evaluating and selecting the most appropriate environmental education program. The main objective of this paper is on presenting the different steps of the comparative analysis of multi-criteria decision-making models and on making conclusions on the suitability and robustness of the SAW, WPM, TOPSIS, and PROMETHEE II models in evaluating environmental education programs.