Environmental education and K-12 student outcomes: A review and analysis of research

ABSTRACT

Many practitioners and researchers describe academic and environmental benefits of environmental education for kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12) students. To consider the empirical underpinnings of those program descriptions, we systematically analyzed the peer-reviewed literature (1994–2013), focusing on outcomes of environmental education programs with K-12 students. In the resulting sample of 119 articles, we identified 121 unique outcomes, finding that most articles reported positive findings from the programs under study. Reflections stemming from the review highlight the versatility of environmental education, while also suggesting opportunities for bolder and more diversified approaches in research design and thinking.

KEYWORDS:

• environmental education outcomes
• K-12 students
• systematic review

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to numerous colleagues who provided feedback on drafts of this paper, especially Bora Simmons and Charlotte Clark. We appreciate the constructive comments from the journal editor and anonymous reviewers; they substantially improved this manuscript. We appreciate Alan Reid's insightful perspective on systematic reviews. We thank Rhoda Wang for research assistance and Wendi Hoover for editorial assistance.

Funding

The Pisces Foundation provided primary support for this study, with additional support from the North American Association for Environmental Education.

Notes

1. By limiting search terms to environmental education, we did not intentionally exclude studies employing related terms such as education for sustainability or conservation education. Although we did not specifically search for those alternates, the final sample includes several studies that describe the educational intervention using those terms, a result of environmental education journals publishing such articles or from those articles including environmental education within the keywords.

2. At the time of the initial search, this represented the most recent 20-year period for which peer-reviewed articles were fully available.

3. We include enough detail so that others may replicate this search, although individual results returned may vary as publishers update databases; moreover, differences in institutional access to databases can affect results.

4. We did not assume that all studies were equal in quality as we acknowledge that the peer-review process is far from perfect. We included criteria to address quality-control issues in our exclusion/inclusion process for each article identified in our search.