Environmental Education Research Bulletin

Ambitious science teaching is a teaching approach designed to improve deep understanding for students of all backgrounds through activities focused on central ideas, discourses, and problems within the science discipline. The four-part framework at its core emphasizes “intellectual engagement” and “attention to equity.” Encouraging educators to draw from interactions with students and embed learning within students' experiences, ambitious science teaching aims for meaningful science teaching and learning based on evidence-based explanations.

Considering student perspectives or allowing for significant student action within environmental education (EE) can be challenging, despite students often learning more when EE material relates to their background. Immigrant youth, in particular, bear this burden, as EE is seldom grounded in their cultural contexts. However, culturally responsive EE, as well as EE situated through nurturing a sense of place, not only aids students' personal development, but also allows them to bring what they learn home to their families.

Staff facilitators and educators are a vital yet overlooked educational resource in museums, science centers, and other informal educational spaces. Little research has been done assessing how staff can impact visitors and/or help them learn from exhibits. To explore this knowledge gap, researchers studied unstructured conversations between staff and visitors interacting with a museum exhibit.

Education staff at zoos, aquariums, nature centers, museums, parks, and other informal learning venues regularly face the complexity of communicating about climate change as they promote understanding and action among their visitors. Visitors enter these venues with prior experiences, understanding, and attitudes that drive what they expect, notice, and ultimately take away. These factors also influence how and what informal educators communicate with their visitors.

Children's drawings can provide vital insight into their understanding and awareness of important issues that might not otherwise be articulated in an interview. Researchers have used drawings to measure children's knowledge and attitudes about environmental issues, revealing that children are conscious of environmental issues and often sympathetic toward nature. However, few studies have examined children's representations of the urban environment and how they relate to sustainability goals.

As museums, zoos, and other science institutions are increasingly trying to promote connection to nature and environmentally responsible behavior, there has been a recent shift away from interpretive nature exhibits to constructed immersive nature experiences. However, the impact of this new form of nature experience on visitors' connection to nature and behavior has not been well studied. Accordingly, the researchers investigated how the experience of visiting an immersive free-flying butterfly exhibit impacted feelings of connection to nature and environmentally responsible behavior.

The degree to which people think they are good at recycling is an important component of recycling behavior, as perceived skills are related to feelings of self-efficacy, which in turn have been shown to increase the chance that people engage in environmental behaviors. People's self-evaluations of their recycling skills, however, cannot always tell us how good they actually are at recycling. Often people overestimate the skills they possess; this overestimation is caused by a number of related factors, such as social norms, expectations of ability, and dispositional traits.

Are girls more sustainability conscious than boys? Studies of how environmental education outcomes differ across genders have long indicated that girls demonstrate greater knowledge, more pro-environmental behavior, stronger preferences for the preservation of nature, and more positive environmental attitudes than boys. Given those prior results, this paper tackles the question of whether Education for Sustainable Development (ESD)—which combines social, environmental, and economic elements—yields the same gender differences as environmental education.

To reduce their environmental footprint, many schools have begun to incorporate sustainable design elements, such as solar panels and water-collection tanks. Evidence also exists that sustainable school design may impact students' environmental attitudes. Yet, while many researchers have explored the influence of recreational space design on children's environmental attitudes, few have considered the effect of learning space design.

One promising avenue for improving early-childhood environmental education is to consider how children develop moral judgments about human behaviors that impact the environment. Over time, research and practice have consistently documented that school-aged children view the environment as having moral standing; that is, they consistently interpret behavior that harms the environment as morally wrong. It is less clear, however, how young children morally judge behaviors that harm the environment.