To reduce their environmental footprint, many schools have begun to incorporate sustainable design elements, such as solar panels and water-collection tanks. Evidence also exists that sustainable school design may impact students' environmental attitudes. Yet, while many researchers have explored the influence of recreational space design on children's environmental attitudes, few have considered the effect of learning space design.
Following ResourceSmart AuSSI Vic, an environmental education action plan that gives a five-star rating to schools achieving the highest level of sustainable design, the researchers used a randomized process to select three sustainably designed schools and four conventional schools in Victoria, Australia. All seven schools were public elementary schools that followed the same national curriculum. The researchers then selected students at random from the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades at each school to complete an environmentally related questionnaire. The questionnaire was designed to assess the students' environmental attitudes in three areas: human-nature interaction, environmentally sustainable design (at school), and human-versus-nature 9 hierarchies. The researchers also provided questionnaires to the students' parents and teachers to control for any influence the parents' and teachers' environmental attitudes may have had on the students. The study ultimately included 143 students who attended conventional schools and 132 students who attended sustainable schools.
The researchers compared students' environmental questionnaire responses, dividing the sample by those at conventional schools versus those attending sustainably designed schools. Using a series of multiple regressions, the researchers also examined whether the environmental attitudes of parents and teachers, and/or the absence of sustainable-school-design features, influenced the students' attitudes in each of the three areas of interest.
The researchers found that parents, teachers, and sustainable-school-design influenced students' attitudes toward human-nature interaction, with teachers' environmental attitudes being the strongest predictor. School design was the strongest predictor of students' attitudes toward environmentally sustainable design; teachers' environmental attitudes also had a significant effect. Finally, the researchers determined that none of the measured factors had a significant effect on students' attitudes toward human-versus-nature hierarchies.
These results suggest that sustainable-school design can encourage students to have positive attitudes toward sustainable elements of the built environment. It may also foster an understanding of the connection between the built environment and the natural world.
The Bottom Line
Sustainable school design can support students' positive attitudes toward a sustainably built environment, as well as foster a connection between the built environment and the natural world. Those positive attitudes may, in turn, contribute to pro-environmental behavior. One way that educators and schools can enhance children's pro-environmental attitudes is to invest in sustainable-design features, such as solar panels, daylighting, gardens, and water tanks, in their schools. Those features will not only reduce students' resource consumption, they will also help students see value in sustainability efforts in the built environment. If schools already have sustainably built features, teachers can enhance the value by drawing attention to those features and emphasizing their importance.