Over the past few decades, environmental educators have sought ways to support students as they learn about the environment and consider ways to become engaged in appropriate, relevant pro-environmental behaviors. Rather than simply providing students with scientific information, educators know the importance of helping students develop critical thinking skills and encouraging a problem-solving mindset, both of which support students to later become engaged in environmental action. Further, the authors suggest that interdisciplinary engagement with environmental issues helps with developing norms, values, and behaviors that align with pro-environmental decisions.
In this study, the authors examined the influence of a project-based environmental education program on students' pro-environmental attitudes in a public high school in Haifa, Israel. Specifically, the researchers focused on the concept of an ecological footprint, which is a model that measures total resources consumed in terms of units of land needed to sustain a particular amount of consumption. The researchers wanted to see whether this model could be used in a school setting to influence students' environmental attitudes and behaviors. In exploring the relationship between natural resource generation and depletion, the ecological footprint concept highlights the environmental impacts of consumption. This focus makes it especially relevant to individual and local-scale environmental action.
The research participants included four 10th-grade classes, with a total of 130 students, who completed a seven-month environmental education program. The study also included a second group of 70 students in two 10th-grade classes that served as a control group. Students who participated in the environmental education intervention were taught the concept of the ecological footprint through a project-based curriculum. The project design included several stages, from identifying causes and consequences of the problem to establishing priorities and plans for action. These classrooms calculated the ecological footprint of their high school in four areas: energy, food, transportation, and materials.
Students calculated the ecological footprint of their school to be 320 hectares for the 2008 school year, although the physical area of the school only covered 2 hectares. In response to this discrepancy, the students developed an action program to reduce the school's ecological footprint, suggesting, for example, reducing the use of air conditioning in classrooms or traveling to school via public transportation. The control classrooms did not engage in the ecological footprint curriculum.
To measure the influence of the environmental intervention on students' attitudes and behaviors, the researchers identified five conceptual measures related to attitude and action: ecological worldview, perceived behavior control, personal norms, behavioral intentions, and pro-environmental behavior. For both the experimental and control classrooms, these behavioral aspects were measured using pre- and post-program surveys. The findings showed that personal norms and behavioral intentions related to pro-environmental action were moderately increased among students in the experimental classes following the intervention. Further, while pro-environmental behavior remained the same on the pre- and post-tests for the experimental classes, it decreased for the control group. This suggests that the intervention may have helped maintain pro-environmental behavior among participants, which might have otherwise decreased after 10th grade. No gains due to the intervention were found for the behavioral measures of ecological worldview or perceived behavioral control.
Ultimately, findings from this study suggest that a project-based curriculum using the concept of ecological footprints might have a positive influence on certain pro-environmental attitudes; however, further research is needed in this area to better understand this relationship.
The Bottom Line
Environmental education curricula that use project-based learning strategies and employ the concept of ecological footprints to help students envision the environmental impacts their actions are having may be more effective than those focused on knowledge provision alone. However, while theory tells us that engagement is more likely to lead to the development of pro-environmental behaviors, the relationships between environmental education and specific changes in attitude or behavior are less clear. It is likely that personal norms and intended behaviors are more easily influenced by environmental education than actual behavior, although norms and intentions may influence individual behavior over a longer period of time.