Education and raising awareness should be one of the primary roles of the institutions that work in biodiversity conservation. Fundació MONA (MONA) is a primate sanctuary that provides housing for chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus), two primate species that are in at risk of extinction. Primates rescued by MONA sanctuary were victims of illegal wildlife trade and they were used as TV and circus stars, advertising models or pets. The main objective of Fundació MONA is to give a second chance to this primates, in a place where they can live in the best possible natural conditions, surrounded by others of their kind and looked after by professional care-givers who provide them with food and other basic needs.

Linked to this work with primates, MONA counts with a conservation education program, as one of its statutory objectives. The main goal of this program is to provide participants with knowledge, which is the first step to promote attitudes and behaviours towards the conservation of primates’ wildlife and their welfare. The program includes different educational activities addressed and adapted to general public and students. These are based in a visit to the sanctuary facilities, during which the educator develops different topics using the life stories of the animals.

General public visits are carried out during weekends and holidays and comprises participants with a wide range of ages, from adults to children and teenagers who come with their families. This group called “general public” was the subject of this study, themain goal wasto evaluate the impact generated by the educational activities in which they participated during their time at the MONA sanctuary. The final purpose was to understand if the activities fulfil their function. In order to achieve this goal, an evaluation and a measure of the impact on their knowledge and attitudes toward primate conservation and welfare, was carried out.

Conservation education programs have been implemented by different organizations as a tool to increase the knowledge and attitudes toward biodiversity conservation (Ardoin et al., 2020; Borchers et al., 2013; Burnett et al., 2016; Chalmin-Pui & Perkins, 2017; Clayton, 2017; Hacker & Miller, 2016). However, since the conceptualization of Environmental Education (Stapp, 1969), there has been an intense debate among the experts about which is the best method to evaluated this kind of programs (Fien et al., 2001). One of the most used method to evaluate and measure the impact of conservation education programs is focused on the knowledge, the attitudes , the pro-conservation behaviours, and the relationship between them (Marcinkowski & Reid, 2019).

Many authors have theorized about the definitions of these words. One of the most accepted definition for Attitudes is the one proposed by Allport (1935), who defined them as: “a mental and neural state of readiness, organized through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon the individual's response to all objects and situations with which it is related.”(p. 810).Regarding to pro-conservation behaviours, we can consider the theory proposed by Stern (2000), defined as: “from the actor’s standpoint as behaviour that is undertaken with the intention to change (normally, to benefit) the environment” (p.408). The relationship between this two concepts is based in the Theory of Planned Behaviour proposed by Ajzen and Fishbein (1991; 1975). This theory defends that people act in accordance with their intentions and perceptions of control over behaviour, while intentions are in turn influenced by attitudes toward the behaviour, subjective norms, and perceptions of behavioural control.

Considering those definitions, the model Knowledge – Attitudes – Behaviour has been used to evaluate and measure the impact of conservation education programs.

Data were obtained from 1221 participants (698 females, 491 males and 8 people who did not define their gender). Ages ranged from 4 to 83 years old. All of them have participated in the conservation education program of MONA between January of 2019 and December of 2020. We developed two questionnaires. The first one was focused on participant’s attitudes towards primate welfare and conservation and the other one, was focused on participant’s knowledge about primate species. These questionnaires were aimed to evaluate changes in participant’s knowledge and attitudes once they finished the education activities. We stablished two groups, the control group and the experimental group. The control group, answered the questionnaire without having been exposed to the educational program, and the experimental group, answered the questionnaire after participating. This study had a between subjects’ design, so each participant just answered one of the two questionnaires. The groups were selected randomly. With this, we wanted to avoid that participants were affected by being exposed to the same questions two times (Bowie et al., 2020; Clayton, 2017). All responses were treated anonymously. All participants answered in paper version of the questionnaire, and then the data was digitalized. We analysed the questionnaires using the same methodology but we analysed them separately. The first step was computing a questionnaire score, based on the proportion of pro-conservation responses, we divided the number of pro-conservation responses by the total number of responses (pro-conservation and non-conservation responses). The second step consisted in analysing the effects of the predictors (moment of the answer, gender, age, educational level and previous visits) in the questionnaire score. For these we used a linear model (Baayen, 2008). Linear Models were run in R by lmer function. We generated various models and selected the model in which predictors offered most parsimonious combination through the corrected Akaike information criterion (AICc) (‘aictab’ function). We also checked whether our models fit the criteria of normal distribution and homogeneous residuals by visual explorations of histograms and ggplot of the residuals as well as residuals plotted against fitted values. The checking of the significance of the predictors at global level by contrasting the full model and the null model, excluding all fixed effects. Finally, we run a comparison using the function “emmeans” and adjusted by Bonferroni test, to see the differences inside each predictor which had significance influence on the questionnaire score.

Results showed that in both cases, the experimental group had significance better results in the questionnaires that the control group. That confirms that the educational activities carried out at the MONA sanctuary had a positive impact on the knowledge and attitudes towards primate conservation and welfare for the people that took part in the activities. With this, we can assure that MONA is accomplishing the goal of its conservation program. Regarding attitudes, our results show that people significantly increased their pro-conservation attitudes after participating in MONA’s education activities. Also, we found that people who had participated before, in the same year, in MONA’s education activities, had a better scoring that people that never had participated or that people that visited MONA more than a year ago. Finally, we also saw a slight significance increase in people who had university studies, and those who were in the range of 32 and 43 years old. Regarding knowledge, our results show that people significantly increased their pro-conservation knowledge about primates after participating in MONA’s education activities. The results, also showed that females increased significantly more their knowledge that males. Finally, we also saw a slight significance increase in the knowledge of people who had university studies.

Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179-211. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90020-T Allport, G. W. (1935). Attitudes. In C. Murchison (Ed.), Handbook of Social Psycholohy (pp. 789-844). Clark University Press. Ardoin, N. M., Bowers, A. W., & Gaillard, E. (2020). Environmental education outcomes for conservation: A systematic review. Biological Conservation, 241, 108224. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2019.108224 Baayen, R. H. (2008). Analyzing Linguistic Data: A Practical Introduction to Statistics using R. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511801686 Borchers, C., Boesch, C., Riedel, J., Guilahoux, H., Ouattara, D., & Randler, C. (2013). Environmental Education in Côte d'Ivoire/West Africa: Extra-Curricular Primary School Teaching Shows Positive Impact on Environmental Knowledge and Attitudes. International Journal of Science Education, Part B, 4(3), 240-259. https://doi.org/10.1080/21548455.2013.803632 Bowie, A., Krupenye, C., Mbonzo, P., Minesi, F., & Hare, B. (2020). Implicit Measures Help Demonstrate the Value of Conservation Education in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Frontiers in Psychology, 11. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00386 Burnett, E., Sills, E., Peterson, M. N., & DePerno, C. (2016). Impacts of the conservation education program in Serra Malagueta Natural Park, Cape Verde. Environmental Education Research, 22(4), 538-550. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2015.1015497 Chalmin-Pui, L. S., & Perkins, R. (2017). How do visitors relate to biodiversity conservation? An analysis of London Zoo’s ‘BUGS’ exhibit. Environmental Education Research, 23(10), 1462-1475. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2016.1259395 Clayton, S. P. A. C. (2017). Public support for Biodiversity after a zoo visit: Environmental concern, conservation knowledge and self-efficacy. Curator: The Museum Journal, 60. https://doi.org/10.1111/cura.12188 Fien, J., Scott, W., & Tilbury, D. (2001). Education and Conservation: Lessons from an evaluation. Environmental Education Research, 7(4), 379-395. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504620120081269 Fishbein, M. A., & Ajzen, I. (1975). Belief, Attitude, Intention and Behaviour: An Introduction to Theory and Research. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. Hacker, C. E., & Miller, L. J. (2016). Zoo visitor perceptions, attitudes, and conservation intent after viewing African elephants at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. Zoo Biology, 35(4). https://doi.org/10.1002/zoo.21303 Marcinkowski, T., & Reid, A. (2019). Reviews of research on the attitude–behavior relationship and their implications for future environmental education research. Environmental Education Research, 25(4), 459-471. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2019.1634237 Stapp, W. B. (1969). The Concept of Environmental Education. Environmental Education, 1(1), 30-31. https://doi.org/10.1080/00139254.1969.10801479 Stern, P. C. (2000). Toward a Coherent Theory of Environmentally Significant Behaviour. Journal of Social Issues, 56(3), 407-424.