Often, one of the main goals of environmental education is to encourage students to become active and environmentally aware individuals. In particular, environmental educators want participants in their programs to practice conservation and environmental activities once they return home. In this study, researchers found that, when students participated in a conservation activity during environmental education programs, they were more likely to continue to engage in environmental behavior after the program had ended. This result suggests that, if environmental educators can incorporate conservation activities into the program, participants will be more likely to continue environmental behaviors when they return home.
For this study, the researchers chose waste separation as the target conservation behavior. The participants were students between the ages of 10 and 12 who attended three secondary schools in neighboring towns in Germany. The towns had similar socioeconomic and political landscapes. One school was assigned to be the control group; the other two schools received different test treatments.
The control group received no instruction and did not participate in a conservation activity. The first test group received instruction around several key themes: (1) “What happens to waste?” (2) “What is the significance of the green spot (the recycling symbol)?” (3) “How to sort waste correctly.” (4) “Why recycle?” Based on these themes, the students designed and implemented an advertising campaign about waste separation. The second control group received the same instruction around those four themes; however, they did not design and implement an advertising campaign.
To examine the impacts related to the elements of the program (instruction; design and implementation of the advertising campaign), the researchers administered a questionnaire as well as a field experiment before, immediately after, and eight weeks following the intervention. The questionnaire was adapted from Bogner and Weiseman's (1999, 2002) environmental perception questionnaire and designed to measure self-reported behavior and waste-separation knowledge. In the field experiment, students were given a piece of candy for completing the questionnaire; then they were dismissed back to class. The candy wrappers were labeled with a UV marker. After the questionnaire session was complete, the researchers sorted through the school's disposal systems to see whether students participating in the study had correctly sorted their candy wrappers.
Results from the field experiment with the candy wrappers showed a significant improvement of waste-separation behavior after the treatment in both of the control groups. The questionnaire results, however, revealed that the behavior was bounded by the theme of the teaching intervention (waste separation). In other words, the conservation behavior did not extend to other types of conservation behaviors but, rather, was specific to waste-separation activities.
With regard to the eight-week follow-up questionnaire, researchers found that both test groups had significantly higher self-reported waste-separation behaviors than the control group. In particular, the test groups showed a significant improvement between pre- and posttest scores related to the subject of “Talking to others about waste separation.”
The results from this study suggest that an intervention, such as the one in this study, which encourages participants to share what they have learned with others in a creative manner, may be useful in influencing students' conservation activities after completion of an environmental education program. Choosing a particular type of conservation activity and asking students to construct a campaign around that activity could help encourage conservation and environmental behavior post-program.
The Bottom Line
Encouraging students to continue conservation behaviors once they have returned home after an environmental education program can be a daunting task. Educators are often left wondering whether—and in what ways—the environmental education experience influenced students' behaviors. This experiment demonstrated that, if the students participate in a conservation activity during programming, they are more likely to continue that conservation activity after the program. However, findings also suggest that the follow-up behavior remains specific to the activity in which the students participated during the program. Therefore, this research supports the idea that, if educators teach conservation activities during an environmental education program, the students will be more likely to continue that specific conservation behavior after the program is completed.