Children's attitudes towards and knowledge about the environment are common indicators of success of EE programs. The Theory of Reasoned Action suggests that knowledge plays an important role in developing a person's attitude and behaviors. Determining children's knowledge about and attitudes toward the environment is an important step to effectively teaching EE to those children.
As urban populations increase, recycling is critical to reduce the amount of household trash that ends up in the ocean or dwindling landfill space. In parts of Ontario, Canada, recycling rates have plateaued and even declined. The authors believe that the reason for this trend is that demographics in Ontario are shifting to include more minority residents, who are less likely to recycle according to prior research. Ontario municipalities have been running promotion and education campaigns regarding recycling, but they do not engage minority groups as successfully.
Many young people struggle to link their personal actions with global problems. Despite concern about environmental issues, those uncertain connections can create confusion on how to take relevant environmentally related action. Furthermore, young people tend to think that government, rather than individuals, is primarily responsible for the environment. This can result in a discrepancy between understanding the source of environmental problems and how individual actions—such as voting, attending political rallies, or recycling—might create change.
Traditionally, secondary-school science education presents science as static, rather than dynamic; focused on inventions, rather than on building knowledge; and intended for a small, elite audience, rather than being inclusive. Those perspectives are important to unpack when considering students' attitudes toward science, especially when addressing topics such as climate change, which can be charged in social and political discourse.
Environmental activist Jane Goodall once said, “Only if we understand can we care. Only if we care will we help. Only if we help shall we be saved.” This perspective suggests the importance of coupling a range of variables—such as emotion, skills development, or self-efficacy—in order to influence environmental behavior. This study explored the relationship of knowledge and emotion with environmentally related behaviors. Specifically, the researchers asked: What role do emotions play in bringing about pro-environmental behaviors?
Across the globe, waste management is a pressing issue. In Britain, the home country of this paper's authors, the vast majority of the nation's municipal waste is from households, and the government has emphasized the need for individuals to be part of the country's waste management strategy. But, the authors note that getting people to take on environmental behaviors such as recycling is no small feat.
Despite research that shows students need multiple ways of interacting to learn, visual language is often treated as though it is the most effective form of teaching communication. Yet, scholars argue, visual information is always coded and interpreted in relation to particular cultures and contexts. To better understand interpretation of information within these cultural and contextual frames, this paper's authors observed video footage of four- to five-year-old children in several Swedish preschools sorting refuse into designated bins.
Often, one of the main elements of environmental education programs is spending time in nature. This derives from the belief of both practitioners and researchers that a relationship exists between time spent in nature and a person's environmental views, behaviors, and overall health. Better understanding the mechanisms behind this relationship could help inform environmental education practice. In this study, the authors considered frequency of children's contact with nature, attitudes toward the environment, and choices of environmentally related behaviors.
Often, one of the main goals of environmental education is to encourage students to become active and environmentally aware individuals. In particular, environmental educators want participants in their programs to practice conservation and environmental activities once they return home. In this study, researchers found that, when students participated in a conservation activity during environmental education programs, they were more likely to continue to engage in environmental behavior after the program had ended.
In Western culture, childhood is often understood as a time of innocence, when children should be sheltered from harsh realities of the world. Topics such as climate change—which emphasize the urgency for behavior change and engagement—can be difficult for early childhood education (ECE) teachers to introduce, because they can bring “reality” into the protected space of childhood. In the first section of this paper, the author explored dominant perspectives about what ECE is and how those perspectives can be detrimental to teaching sustainability.