Environmental Education Research Bulletin

The adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) has shifted educators' focus away from knowledge acquisition to helping students understand the construction and application of scientific ideas in context. This notion of practice-based learning requires creating classroom based opportunities for engaging in authentic science and understanding how scientific knowledge is generated and communicated by professional scientists on an everyday basis, through practices such as argumentation.

Environmental experiences are often central to children's knowledge of their local communities. Building these experiences, and consequently children's knowledge, has the potential to create a strong sense of community belonging for children and positively impact their degree of civic engagement. To help children grow into citizens connected to their community, they need opportunities to connect with nature and engage in local environmental issues. However, children are spending less time in natural spaces and have few opportunities for political involvement.

Zoos and aquariums have the potential to be powerful settings for environmental education. Researchers and practitioners are still learning about the visitor experience and how it can be designed to maximize achievement of key outcomes around conservation. This study considers an exhibition at the London Zoo called Biodiversity Underpinning Global Survival, or BUGS. The study's purposes are threefold. First, the researchers investigated how the exhibition influenced conservation knowledge, beliefs, and perception of pro-environmental actions.

Digital technologies are becoming increasingly common in museums: as part of the interpretive signage, included in the exhibitions, and brought in by visitors themselves. However, many museums oppose or discourage the use of personal mobile communication devices (MCDs), like cell phones or smartphones, concerned that such devices distract visitors from the museum experience.

With the frequency of flooding increasing in the United Kingdom and around the world, flood-risk management and preparedness has emphasized the need for learning how to live with floods and adapt at local levels. However, children are underrepresented in flood preparedness efforts and undervalued as agents of change. This study explored whether intergenerational learning—specifically, children teaching adults—could be a useful strategy for building household and local community resilience to floods.

Youth environmental action projects provide opportunities for fostering young people's personal growth, pro-environmental values, and civic engagement related to environmental issues. However, the sharing of decision-making power among youth and adults in such projects can elicit tensions for educators between encouraging youth autonomy while maintaining some adult authority.

In today's digital era, many researchers, educators, policy makers, and parents express a growing interest in, yet also concern about, the role of technology in environmental education. With this interest, important and potentially tricky questions arise, such as: Can technology based educational experiences promote and support environmental learning in ways that are comparable to live-animal and place-based experiences? Researchers explored this question in the context of a school-based environmental education program.

Education literature has long established that authentic care from adult mentors is crucial for youth—particularly minoritized youth—to develop positive relationships with each other, their school, and their wider community. This study affirms those connections and applies them to the environmental sphere by exploring how the authentic care shown by an environmental science teacher encouraged his students to expand their care for the ecological renewal of their local neighborhood.

Including informal learning experiences, such as field trips, in the formal school curriculum is one way to more closely link classroom experiences with students' everyday lives. Such connections can increase students' scientific literacy, learning outcomes, and overall motivation. When 17 working to connect school with everyday life through field-trip experiences, educators can use certain methods, approaches, and techniques to enhance learning.

One effective strategy to promote desired behaviors can be to use a point-of-decision prompt: this involves priming people at the time they are making a decision. Point-of-decision prompts have been used in promoting pro-environmental behaviors, such as signs that remind 11 one to turn off the lights when exiting a room. However, previous research has dealt with points of decision after an action or as a way to discourage future actions.