Energy literacy and agency of New Zealand children

Abstract

The development of energy literacy (knowledge, attitudes, and intended behaviour) and agency of New Zealand children (age 9–10) were investigated through thematic and exploratory statistical analyses of interviews (October 2011–April 2012) with 26 children, their parents and teachers, focus groups and photo elicitation. The children knew that electricity costs money and saw it as a finite resource. Half could name an energy source but few knew of any associated environmental issues. Most of the children had a positive attitude towards saving electricity, but did not intend to save energy to a further extent (low intended behaviour) and were not influencing their families to conserve energy (low agency). The children were learning about energy informally from a variety of sources, and acquired their attitudes mostly from talking to their parents. The results highlight the need for energy education for citizenship at school and conversations about energy both there and at home.

Keywords:

• energy literacy
• children
• electricity
• energy knowledge
• attitudes
• agency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The entire NZ primary school curriculum is based on learning objectives, with teachers having the freedom to choose the topics to fulfil them.

2. Children in Dunedin live and attend school in the same neighbourhood.

3. The focus groups were also video-recorded in order to differentiate the children’s voices.

4. Survey developed by the Energy Cultures, University of Otago (Stephenson, Barton, et al. 2010; Stephenson, Lawson, et al. 2010) based on literature (e.g. Barr and Gilg 2006 for sustainable behaviours; Dunlap and Van Liere 2008 for personal values), revised by an external panel of experts, and trialled and developed in four stages (Lawson and Williams 2012).

5. Categories having less than three frequency counts were excluded and the threshold of significance was set to p = 0.04 since many of the marginally significant values were unstable owing to the small sample.

6. Only analyses with total inertia values greater than 0.2 (i.e. explaining more than 20% of the total variance; Hair et al. 1998; Mazzocchi 2008), and significantly different from zero were taken into account (p < 0.05; Mazzocchi 2008; Starkweather and Herrington 2012).

7. All participants were assigned pseudonyms to ensure anonymity.

8. All of the children talked about it.

9. In total, one third of the children were aware of environmental issues related to energy production.

10. The percentage of agreement between the parents’ and children’s responses was calculated. They mostly agreed on the children’s energy saving behaviours and rationale for saving power, but disagreed on their awareness of energy sources: in only two cases did the answers of the parents completely match those of their children, and for a third of the families the answers were completely different.

11. The highest possible score for energy saving attitudes in the parents’ survey was arbitrarily divided into three equal categories (low, medium and high). Parents scoring high were considered to have strong attitudes towards saving energy. The frequency and depth of energy conversations was determined through the thematic analysis of the children and parents interviews. Seventy-five percent of the parents did not score high on the energy saving survey and did not talk about energy with their children often or in depth.

12. Only for children with strong environmental values.

Additional information

Funding

This work was made possible by funding from the Mexican Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT) and the University of Otago, New Zealand.