A Model for Fostering the Transfer of Learning in Environmental Education

summary

Environmental education programmes can only deal with some of the environmental issues that people face through their life. People will need, therefore, to transfer learning to new situations. In this article factors that could foster transfer are identified, and collected in a model. This model suggests that work in environmental education should be relevant, started by exploring the previous knowledge of those who learn in order to carry out a new learning process valid for resolving authentic environmental problems, and practising the application of what has been learnt to different cases. It also suggests that related content fields should be consciously used: culture, valuation, performance, reasoning, and communication. In each field resources of different cognitive scope, belonging to specific domains, general domains, and meta‐domain, have been identified. The model appears to be interesting for the theoretical development of environmental education, and could also facilitate the design of tools to analyse, improve and create proposals in this area.