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Boundary organizations are situated between science, policy, and practice and have a goal of supporting communication and collaboration among these sectors. They have been promoted as a way to improve the effectiveness of conservation efforts by building stronger relationships between scientists, policy makers, industry, and practitioners (Cook et al. 2013). Although their promise has been discussed in theory, the work of and expectations for boundary organizations are less defined in practice. Biodiversity conservation is characterized by complexity, uncertainty, dissent, and tight budgets, so boundary organizations face the challenging task of demonstrating their value to diverse stakeholders. We examined the challenges boundary organizations face when seeking to evaluate their work and thus aimed to encourage more productive conversations about evaluation of boundary organizations and their projects. Although no off-the-shelf solution is available for a given boundary organization, we identified 4 principles that will support effective evaluation for boundary organizations: engage diverse stakeholders, support learning and reflection, assess contribution to change, and align evaluation with assumption and values.

Although there is considerable activity in developing assessment protocols for undergraduate learning, there are few established models for assessment of student progress in multidisciplinary doctoral‐level graduate education. To resolve this impediment in tracking graduate student development, we created a simple assessment tool based on the concept of T competency that allows graduate students to articulate explicit learning goals in disciplinary and multidisciplinary research. Our instrument allows quantitative measurement of a student's self‐perception of his/her knowledge and interest in multidisciplinary inquiry. We use our T assessment tool to measure graduate student progress in an NSF IGERT‐funded graduate program in coastal ecosystem management. The T model provides us a nomenclature to articulate learning goals, a quantitative means to evaluate current and future learning targets and progress in reaching those targets, and gives us another measure of assessing overall graduate program effectiveness. Our T tool is an instrument that should have considerable utility in measuring knowledge and interest in multidisciplinary research across a range of disciplines and graduate programs.