Environmental education (EE) poses an opportunity to build recycling rates in communities by engaging students, teachers, and parents. In Iran, municipal recycling rates hover around 8% annually compared to other countries where municipal recycling rates can exceed 80% each year. The researchers drew upon the Albanian Health Promoting Schools Model (HPSM), which promotes health and well-being in the curriculum with different projects for students, teachers, and parents. The projects include class lectures and exhibitions for students, seminars and curricula workshops for teachers, and conferences and round-tables for parents. In this study, the researchers deployed educational interventions for Iranian students, parents, and teachers to determine this teaching model's impact on promoting recycling knowledge and recycling behaviors in the community.
The study took place between October 2015 and May 2016 in Maragheh, East Azerbaijan Province, Iran. The participants included 413 students from the 4th, 5th, and 6th grades from 2 all-girls and 2 all-boys schools. There were also 49 teachers across the 4 schools and 68 parents included in the study. The test group had 207 students, 19 teachers, and 34 parents, while the control group had 206 students, 20 teachers, and 34 parents. Each participant type (e.g., parent, teacher, student) within the test group experienced a tailored intervention as part of the study. The students took part in 7, 45-minute lessons about recycling and 8 promotional experiences related to recycling and using recycled materials (e.g., poetry competitions, playing games, designing crafts, listening to songs). The teachers attended a 1-hour session about teaching methods on recycling and then engaged in a 65-minute discussion about how to implement these methods in the classroom. The parents were invited into the school and listened to 2, 60-minute training sessions about the importance of recycling and strategies to participate in recycling activities at home. The researchers distributed questionnaires to the test and control groups tailored to participant type (e.g., parent, teacher, student) that included questions on recycling awareness, attitude, performance, and participation. The latter, performance and participation, referred to the individual's attempts at recycling and actual recycling actions, respectively. Both groups' questionnaires were analyzed and compared against each other to detect the impact of the interventions.
The analysis revealed the average scores for awareness and attitude of recycling, performance in supporting recycling behaviors and knowledge, and participation in recycling activities for students, parents, and teachers in the test group were much higher than the control group. Overall, the researchers concluded the various interventions used for each participant type positively impacted the participants' motivation to recycle and their understanding of best recycling practices. The test groups' questionnaire results for performance and participation showed parents and teachers that experienced the intervention positively impacted the students by encouraging them to recycle and reiterated to the students the importance of recycling on the environment. However, the researchers pointed out that parents and teachers tended to have more limited recycling knowledge.
One limitation in this study was that it took place in Iran, making the results not generalizable to other countries. Replicating this study and its interventions in other areas of Iran would help provide more context for the impact of these educational tools.
Based on the results, the researchers suggested that schools target recycling education and programming to parents and teachers to influence environmental literacy and pro-environmental behaviors in students. Overall, the researchers recommended following a similar structure to the HPSM in schools to support a holistic approach to increase recycling in the community.
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