Are Environmental Professors Unbalanced? Evidence From the Field

Abstract

Most outcomes assessment in higher education has focused on content knowledge or skills development; however, attitudinal change is also a legitimate focus of assessment. We use the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) to test whether courses designed to meet the same university environmental literacy requirement changed student environmental attitudes, and whether these changes resulted from instructor and/or course-content effects. We found student environmental attitudes did change significantly but in different directions depending upon who taught the course. The ability to measure such changes adds to the discussion in the environmental education community on the desired nature of attitudinal change and of the responsibilities of higher education instructors.

Keywords:

• environmental attitudes and values
• environmental literacy
• New Ecological Paradigm

Notes

^aStatistic tests whether the distribution of the student characteristics differs across course/instructor offerings.

^bBPPH = Business, Public Policy and Health; EHD = Education and Human Development; ENG = Engineering; LAS = Liberal Arts and Sciences; NSFA = Natural Sciences, Forestry and Agriculture

1. The NEP response categories are: 1 = Agree Strongly; 2 = Agree Mildly; 3 = Unsure; 4 = Disagree Mildly and 5 = Disagree Strongly.

2. The study is limited by the non-random nature of the samples. Further, the reactions of students attending these courses may not be representative of other populations (i.e., high school students, other college students, etc.).

3. Unfortunately, course enrollment data for these classes is no longer available.

4. There are generally two types of withdrawal: a withdrawal occurring early in the semester generally reflects students who decide the content of the course is not relevant. Later withdrawals are usually made by students who are not performing well in the class. The loss of either type of student may affect the validity of this study's results.

5. Because our sample is not a probability sample, and may suffer from both sample selection and mortality problems, the study results may not be representative of outside populations (Kish, 1965).

6. The presence of cohort effects in environmental education classes is indicated by Tikka, Kuitunen, and Tynys (2000) and Hodgkinson & Innes (2001).

7. We used factor analysis on the NEP questions to confirm multidimensionality with this sample, and to determine which NEP questions load on factors most important in explaining student's eco-attitudes. For the factor analysis we used principal components analysis followed by Varimax rotation. As is typical, factors with Eigen values less than one are dropped from further analysis. To further verify the reliability of the analysis we compute Cronbach's alpha on the original responses; aiming to have alphas greater than the minimum value of 0.70 suggested by Nunnally and Bernstein (1994).

8. In essence, the CHAR and PREC variables are included in the analyses solely to control for differences in attitudes related to observable (CHAR) or unobservable (PREC) differences in respondents.

9. We do not present parameter estimates from the 45 equations; for further information contact the first author.

10. According to the designers of the NEP, ‘greener’ scores for questions 1 and 11 reflect an increased ‘limits to growth’ perspective and ‘greener’ scores for questions 10 and 15 reflects an increased perception of the risks of an eco-crisis (Dunlap et al., 2000).

11. Full results available from the first author.

12. For simplicity we do not present these comparisons in Table 3.

13. Two tests cannot be performed since the percent “uncertain” on Q7 for INT-C is not able to be estimated.