The educational program the study in this article is devoted to is called Sharing Tails ®. Sharing Tails ® is a public outreach program developed in Arizona to help educate the children of Arizona public schools about the native fish population and the importance of protecting endangered wildlife.

The program is highly interactive, developed especially for the very curious but not very easily focused minds of the kindergarten classroom. Special in class activities were developed like life sized fish replicas, craft projects, and even an interactive presentation using a projector to depict an underwater scene and a bubble machine to take the kids “underwater” for a lesson.

The study described in the article was a project assessment conducted in order to measure how effective the program was in teaching children about native fish. There needed to be a means of measuring the progress the children made, so pre-presentation and post-presentation questionnaires were used by teachers to do so. The scores on these questionnaires helped the researchers measure how much the children were actually learning about the fish and how well the program as a whole was working. The project assessment reported the programs activities to be quite successful, but also identified the limitations to the research, such as incomplete questionnaires.

This program represents the valuable contributions that the sciences and environmental education can make to the education of children. The idea that subjects of conservation and wildlife can also prove successful and engaging for young audiences was reflected in the data the program assessment collected.

Carol A. Pacey & Paul C. Marsh (2013) Sharing Tails®: A State-Wide Public  Outreach Program Teaching Children About Native Arizona Fish, Applied Environmental Education & Communication, 12;4, 254-260, DOI: 10.1080/1533015X.2013.877711