Cognitive learning about forests: the key role of environmental attitude

ABSTRACT

For young people, schools are platforms for learning and strengthening competencies about nature preservation; despite being faced with the same learning opportunities, learning outcomes are very heterogeneous. We were interested in environmental knowledge gains and retention after participation in a student-centred learning programme, and in environmental attitudes’ role in knowledge acquisition. 261 students participated in a 90-minute programme about the forest ecosystem and related sustainability topics. Our 8-station in-classroom module relied on a collaborative, hands-on, and autonomy-supportive learning approach. We measured knowledge three times: before the programme (pre-test), right after programme completion (post-test), and six weeks after programme completion to test long-term performance (retention test), using the Rasch model. Knowledge scores increased in the post-test and decreased in the retention test but remained significantly above pre-test scores. Environmental attitude had a considerable effect on knowledge scores of each test time, though effects on pre- and retention scores were larger. This indicates that students with positive attitudes knew more before the programme and retained more knowledge over time. Interestingly, the retention scores of those with the most positive attitudes exceeded their post-programme scores, which suggests further immersion into the topic, rendering attitude a probable and promising lever for long-term knowledge acquisition.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental attitude
• Cognitive learning
• Student-centred

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Correction

Acknowledgements

We thank all teachers and students who participated in our study, and all researchers and in particular Dr. Thorn who collected and provided the data. We also thank Stephen Tomkins for his final suggestions on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics statement

The study was approved by the Bavarian Ministry of Education (‘Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Bildung und Kultus, Wissenschaft und Kunst’ (II.7-5 O 5106/92/7, and III.9-5 O 5106/91/13). This approval involves the written consent of all principals of all participating schools, all participants and their legal guardians. It also involves data privacy laws that relies on pseudonymized data.

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500693.2024.2341213)

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Bayreuth, the Elite study programme MINT Teacher Education PLUS (S-NW-2015-316), and the “Qualitätsoffensive Lehrerbildung” (BMBF 01JA1901).