Educational impact on the relationship of environmental knowledge and attitudes

Abstract

This study examines the relationships between the environmental attitudes and environmental knowledge of schoolchildren within the framework of an environmental intervention. We employed questions from the 2-MEV model to monitor students’ environmental attitudes in terms of the model factors Preservation and Utilisation while concurrently monitoring three environmental knowledge dimensions (system, action-related and effectiveness knowledge) at three different test times during the course of a four-day field centre programme for fourth-graders (N = 133, M_age = 9.8 years). Probably due to measurement constraints (e.g. a ceiling effect, social desirability), we found no correlation between environmental knowledge and the attitude Preservation at all test times. The attitude Utilisation correlated negatively with all environmental knowledge dimensions, indicating that students who score higher on Utilisation are more likely, for example, to have and gain more system knowledge through programme participation than the other students or vice versa, as a causal relationship cannot be derived from our analyses: system knowledge may also influence Utilisation. In other words, children who refrain from (ab)using nature also seem to put more effort into improving their environmental knowledge and/or children who engage in learning about the environment will become less exploitative towards the environment.

Keywords:

• Environmental education
• educational evaluation
• primary school
• reciprocal relationship

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Anne Gebhardt and Cornelia Riedel for their support during the programme implementation at the ‘Schullandheim Weißenstadt’, and we thank all participating students and their teachers. Additionally, we thank the three dedicated reviewers who helped improve this article with their constructive comments.