Two ways of acquiring environmental knowledge: by encountering living animals at a beehive and by observing bees via digital tools

ABSTRACT

Pollinating animals are profoundly affected by the current loss of biodiversity, a problem that is of concern to science, policy-makers and the public. One possibility to raise awareness for pollinator conservation is education. Unfortunately, insects such as bees are often perceived as frightening creatures; a negative emotion that may hinder successful learning processes. Thus, any educational initiative must conquer this obstacle and promote conservational knowledge. Using a quasi-experimental design, we evaluated the effectiveness of an educational programme using two student-centred learning approaches: One by encountering living honeybees (Apis mellifera) at a beehive (N = 162), the other by using an eLearning tool connected to a remote beehive (N = 192). We monitored secondary school students’ environmentally relevant knowledge of bees, their environmental attitudes and their perception of bees in regard to conservation and dangerousness. The results indicate that both approaches lead to the acquisition of conservational knowledge in the short and medium term. Direct experiences with nature are regarded as crucial, but using an eLearning tool in environmental education constitutes an outstanding alternative to acquire knowledge. Adolescents with low ‘green’ attitudes responded positively to the online beehive, and the perceived danger of bees played no role in the learning process.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental education
• cognitive achievement
• eLearning
• living animals
• programme evaluation

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the ‘Umweltstation Weismain’ providing the local beehive and supporting us during the programme implementation. We are grateful to all students and teachers for their cooperation in our study. We also thank Maximiliane Schumm, Sarah Schmid and Michael Wiseman for discussing earlier stages of our paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Mona L. Schönfelder http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0718-2412

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the GreeNET Project funded by European Union Framework of the Lifelong Learning Programme under grant agreement no. [527891].