This article presents a comprehensive systematic review investigating environmental education's contributions to conservation and environmental quality outcomes. The researchers aimed to better understand how environmental education creates research-implementation spaces where educational outcomes occur, are measured, and reported with direct benefits to the environment.
The study employed a mixed-methods approach to analyze the final sample of 105 articles distributed across 51 peer-reviewed journals from environmental education, education, conservation, and natural sciences fields. The researchers searched seven EBSCOhost databases using combinations of environmental education terms (environmental education, conservation education, education for sustainability) and conservation-related terms derived from planetary boundaries frameworks (climate change, biodiversity, pollution, water quality, etc.).
Environmental education is defined as approaches, tools, and programs that develop and support environmentally related attitudes, values, awareness, knowledge, and skills that prepare people to take informed action on behalf of the environment. The researchers noted that effective environmental education represents more than unidirectional information transfer - it creates synergistic spaces where stakeholders collaborate to address dynamic environmental issues over time.
The review categorized outcomes along a continuum from indirect to direct environmental impact. Indirect outcomes included behavioral antecedents (awareness, knowledge, attitudes, intentions, skills), self-reported behaviors, and community capacity building. Direct outcomes included ecological indicators (measurable physical environmental improvements), observed behaviors (documented actual behavior changes), and completed environmental actions (quantifiable conservation activities like tree planting or habitat restoration).
The results showed that 91 studies (87%) measured behavioral antecedents, making this the most frequently reported outcome type. Completed environmental action was reported in 48 studies (46%), community capacity building in 41 studies (39%), self-reported behaviors in 30 studies (29%), observed behaviors in 11 studies (10%), and ecological indicators in only 4 studies (4%). The overwhelming majority of studies (103, or 98%) reported positive or mixed results, with only two studies reporting null results and none reporting negative findings.
The researchers identified a subsample of 56 studies that reported direct outcomes (ecological indicators, observed behavior, and environmental actions) versus 49 studies reporting only indirect outcomes. Chi-square analyses revealed that programs reporting direct outcomes differed significantly from those reporting indirect outcomes on primary topic addressed, with pollution-focused programs more likely to report direct outcomes and climate change programs more likely to report indirect outcomes.
Through qualitative analysis of the direct outcomes subsample, four key themes emerged for programs successfully achieving and documenting direct conservation impacts:
Theme 1: Focus on localized environmental issues or locally relevant dimensions of broader issues. Many successful programs leveraged participants' immediate home environment at scales like watersheds, parks, or schoolyards to connect with broader environmental issues. Local settings facilitate measurement of direct outcomes and help mitigate issues of scale, as it's easier to measure water quality changes in a local creek than attempt to measure polar ice cap changes.
Theme 2: Collaboration with scientists and resource managers from local agencies and organizations. Programs were often embedded in partnerships with universities, community groups, scientific organizations, businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies. These collaborations provided expertise and resources conducive to achieving direct environmental outcomes and created embedded contexts with fertile ground for increased results.
Theme 3: Incorporation of action elements into programs. Successful programs deliberately employed action-oriented learning strategies including citizen science, service learning, project-based learning, and issue investigation. Action components explicitly tackled environmental challenges through direct physical improvements like removing invasive species, organizing cleanups, and performing environmental monitoring.
Theme 4: Intentional, thorough, and innovative measurement and reporting of program outcomes. Striking programs dedicated significant thought and preparation to evaluation, taking care to record quantitative data like number of trees planted or trash removed. Several programs were intentionally designed around explicit conservation goals, enabling high-quality quantitative data collection related to ecological indicators.
The researchers noted several limitations, including potential publication bias toward positive results, search terms that may have excluded broader environmental issues, focus on English-language peer-reviewed literature, and the challenge of documenting complex socio-ecological system outcomes. They emphasized that few studies provided quantified data describing changes in ecological indicators like air quality, water quality, or threatened species populations.
The review highlighted citizen science as one environmental education approach receiving particular attention in conservation biology that naturally aligns with the four identified themes. Citizen science involves public participation in scientific research that yields reliable data, typically focuses on local-scale data collection, involves collaboration with scientists, includes action-oriented research projects, and naturally facilitates data collection and outcome measurement.
The researchers concluded that environmental education can create synergistic research-implementation spaces that invite participation, collaboration, and co-production among diverse stakeholders. However, they identified substantial opportunities for environmental education programs intentionally designed to pursue and document environmental quality and conservation outcomes. The findings suggest abundant options for measuring and reporting impacts while emphasizing practical strategies like incorporating action components, connecting with researchers for ecological monitoring, basing programs in local natural areas, and designing initiatives based on community needs.
The study calls for future focus on developing robust evaluation systems that effectively track conservation outcomes, innovative ways to measure observable behaviors beyond self-reports, and methods to characterize environmental education efforts within broader conservation initiatives. The researchers emphasize that environmental education research and practice can contribute to transformative activities impacting environmental quality through various pathways, with benefits occurring across short and long-term timeframes.
The Bottom Line
This systematic review by Ardoin et al. (2020) examined how environmental education contributes to conservation and environmental quality outcomes by analyzing 105 studies published between 1997-2016. The researchers found that environmental education programs documented strongly positive outcomes overall, with 98% reporting positive or mixed results. However, only 56 studies (53%) reported direct conservation outcomes such as ecological improvements, observed behavior changes, or completed environmental actions, while the majority focused on indirect outcomes like knowledge, attitudes, and self-reported behaviors. The review identified four key characteristics of programs that successfully achieved and documented direct conservation impacts: focusing on localized environmental issues, collaborating with scientists and resource managers, incorporating hands-on action elements, and implementing intentional measurement and reporting structures. The findings demonstrate that environmental education can create synergistic research-implementation spaces where stakeholders collaborate to address environmental challenges, but greater emphasis is needed on designing programs specifically to achieve and document tangible conservation outcomes rather than just behavioral antecedents.