Results

"As a professional program evaluator, I see lots of non-profit programs. [World Savvy] takes evaluation seriously and has instilled a culture of learning and evaluation" Michael Quinn Patton, 2010

World Savvy's Impact

Over the past ten years, World Savvy's programs and services have demonstrated significant impact on students' knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviors for global citizenship, as well as educators' capacity to consistently integrate teaching and learning for global competency into classroom instruction across disciplines.

Click here to see how World Savvy defines Global Competency.

World Savvy is committed to ongoing evaluation and improvement of our programs as well as measurement of our impact on the students and teachers we serve. Each year, we conduct qualitative and quantitative evaluations of our programs as well as a developmental evaluation process to ensure ongoing reflection and adaptation. 

Click here to see our 2011-12 Youth Engagement Program results.

By the numbers:

Since founding, World Savvy has reached more than 250,000 youth and 2000 educators. During the 2011-12 school year, World Savvy served 5218 youth and 277 educators directly through our youth engagement programming. World Savvy reached over 2,000 educators and 117,500 students through our online educators network.

Some highlights from the 2011-12 program year include:

  • 90% of teachers surveyed agreed that students’ knowledge and understanding of complexities and interdependence of world events and issues increased
    through participation of the program.
  • 90% of educators indicated that students’ understanding of sustainability and other
    global issues increased.
  • 80% of educators indicated an increase in students’ knowledge of world and human geography.
  • 95% of educators saw significant growth in their students critical thinking skills.
  • 90% of educators saw growth in students’ teamwork and collaboration skills as well as students’ ability to communicate effectively and express themselves creatively.
  • 90% of educators agreed that students showed more empathy, concern for the perspectives of others, comfort with ambiguity and self-awareness as a result of the program.
  • Quantitative results from the World Savvy Challenge tell us that 60% of students are more likely to seek out multiple opinions and take informed action on issues that matter to them.
  • 80% of teachers in both the World Savvy Challenge and Media & Arts program felt that their students’ behaviors were likely to change, in fact, 86% of youth participants in the program became involved with new organizations or deepened their work with organizations they had worked with in the past as a result of program participation and implementation of their program project.

Beyond the numbers...

 “My students were able to do research on topics that interested them yet all under the umbrella of a Big idea. The length and depth of this project forced them to think outside of the box”. - World Savvy Challenge Coach

“I believe [the World Savvy Challenge] helped [my students] gain a better perspective of their place in this world and what they can do to help”. - World Savvy Challenge Coach

“Here is a comment from my student that sums up what I hope that they can take away from WSC: ‘The world is big, big enough for everyone to live equally. Yet, we don’t live equally; we can change this, no matter where you live or who you are.’ - pretty profound for a 7th grader.”- World Savvy Challenge Coach

“The MAP curriculum provided opportunities for students and teachers to learn from
each other and value a sense of community.” - MAP Educator

"My Service Learning Project humbled me in such a way that couldn’t be explained. I worked with the villagers in the chars of Sirajganj elevating school structures and planting fruit-bearing trees. During my time working in the chars I learned about the struggles that the villagers go through everyday and how the home gets flooded every couple of years. These living situations make it hard to raise a family and to stay together as a village and as a community. But through all the heartache of losing family and friends, the villagers still had smiles on their faces. Even though I felt like we could’ve done more to help them, I know that they deeply appreciated our hard work and effort. On the last day of working in the chars the head villager apologized for anything that they could’ve done to make us feel uncomfortable. This blew me away because it should have been the other way around; we were the guests in their village". - American Youth Leadership Program Student

“One student in the Media & Arts Program wrote a full-page essay on her frustrations and thoughts about water sustainability and bottled water issues. The essay was a moment in which I knew students really understanding that learning is not just about getting good grades and/or getting to college, but about making change for you, your family, your community and your world.” - MAP Educator

Defining Global Competency

Efforts to define and assess the characteristics of globally competent persons are few and far between.  The task clearly has not received the attention it deserves.  Global awareness, for example, is sometimes defined in terms of a selective set of facts and geographic information that presumably everyone should know.  A knowledge-based assessment of global competence, however, runs headlong into the same problems associated with earlier attempts to define cultural literacy:  since no one can learn all the facts, who or what determines which facts are most important? Over the past several years, World Savvy has been committed to the task of defining and evaluation global competence.  During this process, we found that identifying appropriate items for validity that discriminate and capture change was challenging, not a unique problem when attempting to measure complex social and developmental concepts. World Savvy continues to work with an evaluation consultant to design and implement and evaluation process that effectively measures the complex nature of World Savvy's work in the realm of global competency.