Monitoring changes in environmental attitudes at higher education institutions

Higher education institutions worldwide have established programs that focus on varying environmental topics, such as sustainability, sustainable development, or environmental education. Despite these nominal differences, universities and colleges with such programs seek to encourage students to adopt pro-environmental behaviors and improve upon their knowledge of the environment. Some institutions may undergo drastic changes such as creating a new school focused on environment and sustainability while others may commit little, if anything, to environmental education. In this study, the researchers sought to determine how higher education systems can monitor their effect on students and whether students' environmental attitudes change during their university or college experience.

The authors argue that without a monitoring process, universities are unable to understand a program's efficacy. Traditional processes often assess individual assignments or exams, which may be insufficient for measuring the efficacy of education programs. The New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) scale is regarded as the best tool for measuring environmental attitudes. The NEP asks respondents to record their agreement level with 15 statements. For example, one of the statements reads “Plants and animals have as much right as humans to exist”; scores ranged between 1 (strongly disagree) and 5 (strongly agree), with higher scores suggesting the student has strong environmental awareness. The authors applied the “four-tendency model” to describe the four most common behavioral tendencies following from questions asked in the NEP instrument: 1) conservation, 2) recycling, 3) caution about the future, and 4) supporting plant and animal rights.

This study took place at the University of Otago on the South Island of New Zealand. Participants were selected from one of three programs: Zoology, Human Nutrition, and Surveying. Students were divided into two cohorts: cohort 1 consisted of students who started their education in 2009 while cohort 2 contained students who started in 2010. While researchers petitioned all students from each cohort to take the survey, participation was voluntary. Each participating student completed the NEP survey during their first year and again the following two years into their respective program. In the subsequent years, the students took the surveys whenever the teacher felt it fit the curriculum; therefore, students from different programs took the survey at disparate times throughout the year. The researchers only included respondents who took the survey two or more times. A total of 89 participants were included from cohort 1 and 125 from cohort 2 for a total of 512 survey responses over multiple years. The researchers used statistics to analyze the results to investigate whether attitudes increased over time and whether students indicated any changes to the four behavioral tendencies.

Overall, the results indicated that attending the University of Otago did not cause participants' environmental attitudes to shift over time.

The researchers found that participants' program of study influenced average NEP scores. Findings demonstrated that mean NEP scores from students within the Zoology concentration were significantly higher than mean scores of students in both Human Nutrition and Surveying However, there was no significant difference in average scores between cohorts or over time.

The study also evaluated the data in terms of the four behavioral tendencies and found only a significant impact to recycling over time. However, the authors point out that this was a small change, cautioning that although significant, this finding indicates that it may take years for a student's university experience to change their recycling habits.

Unsurprisingly, students from the Zoology program have higher NEP scores because they may have greater ecological awareness than students from the Human Nutrition or Surveying concentration. Although the authors did not specify why they surveyed students from these backgrounds, they cautioned against generalizing these results to all higher education institutions because universities and colleges may promote different environmentally-friendly practices or use varying environmental education approaches. In addition, students from other countries may respond differently to the NEP test so practitioners should use caution when generalizing the results to all students.

Despite this research failing to prove that the University of Otago significantly alters its student's environmental awareness and knowledge, the authors encourage institutions to use the NEP instrument to evaluate the success of their respective environmental education program. Higher education institutions should continue to build environmental education into their curricula to encourage the creation of environmental advocates.