Abstract:
Nature education serves as a critical pathway for national parks to fulfill their public functions and advance ecological conservation. As China′s national park system continues to improve, nature education activities have expanded rapidly in both scale and variety. However, practical challenges remain in quality assurance and management, such as ambiguous evaluation objectives, fragmented analytical perspectives, and insufficient operational guidance. Existing evaluation methods often focus on isolated activities or post-event outcomes, making it difficult to support systematic optimization across the entire process of planning, implementation, and governance. To address these issues, this study adopts a whole-process management perspective to construct a structured and operational evaluation system for nature education in national parks. This framework integrates ex-ante and ex-post evaluations and analyzes from three dimensions: micro-level activities, meso-level organization, and macro-level national park governance. By combining process evaluation with hierarchical analysis, nature education activities can be evaluated both as independent educational practices and as institutional practices embedded within the park management system. This approach clearly reveals how educational quality, organizational capacity, and governance support jointly shape overall educational outcomes. The study systematically reviews relevant domestic and international research findings, policy documents, and technical standards in the fields of nature education, environmental education, and protected area management. Through comprehensive methods including literature analysis, expert consultation, and case integration, core evaluation dimensions are identified and a logically coherent indicator system is constructed. To enhance the scientific rigor and practical feasibility, the Delphi method is employed to quantify expert judgments on indicator importance, while the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used to conduct consistency tests on indicator weights. These methods are applied not to build complex models but to ensure logical consistency, transparency, and operability in practical applications. The final evaluation system specifies corresponding ex-ante and ex-post evaluation contents across each analytical dimension. At the micro level, the focus is on activity design quality, educational content, resource suitability, and learning outcomes. At the meso level, attention is given to curriculum systems, organizational management, capacity building, risk control, and partnership networks. At the macro level, it examines policy support, governance structures, funding mechanisms, and the contribution of nature education to public value within the national park system. Additionally, the system incorporates standardized scoring methods and feedback mechanisms to support the iterative improvement of educational practices and adaptive management. The innovation of this study lies in shifting nature education evaluation from a fragmented outcome-oriented approach to an integrated process-oriented framework. It clarifies the hierarchical transmission of educational effectiveness from activities to governance, providing methodological reference for the standardized implementation of nature education evaluation in national parks. Although the framework requires further empirical validation through field application, it establishes a systematic foundation for subsequent evaluation practices and related research.