Using the chemistry classroom as the starting point for engaging urban high school students and their families in pro-environmental behaviors

ABSTRACT

Evolving mobile technology and the rapid spread of STEM-focused informal learning environments have created a unique opportunity to break through the barriers that have traditionally separated diverse learning contexts such as school, family, and community. Previous research suggest that in a well-designed family learning environment, both parents and children can make significant gains in science knowledge, science skills, and positive attitudes toward science, and academic self-efficacy. Families, Organizations, and Communities Understanding Science, Sustainability, and Service (FOCUSSS) is a design-based research project created to blur the boundaries between formal and informal learning contexts: chemistry classrooms (formal environments) and at-home, local, and museum (informal environments). In doing so, adoption of real-world, pro-environmental behaviors can be promoted to have tangible positive impacts on individuals, families, communities, and the environment. Data from this two-year program support that cutting across contexts does indeed correlate with increased self-efficacy in science and positive changes in pro-environmental behavior. Furthermore, the FOCUSSS design framework appears to be quite robust, delivering consistent results across variations including teacher, grade level, school type (neighborhood, charter, private), and parent education.

KEYWORDS:

• Design-based research
• sustainability science
• informal-formal collaborations
• pro-environmental behavior

Acknowledgements

Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in these materials are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF. We thank Adam Tarnoff, FOCUSSS project coordinator and collaborator, for support and development of FOCUSSS activities and effect measures. His work unequivocally provided the skeletal bones for the body of project activities. We thank Charles Bilodeau, FOCUSSS instructional coach, for his guiding wisdom and ideas for creating effective instructional activities; and Leah Bertke, Eleanor Flanagin, Brian Hayes, and Neil Reimer, teachers who partnered with us in the FOCUSSS project, without whom this project would never have had legs to move forward.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 All statistical analyses were run using SPSS 22.0. All assumptions of normally distributed, variances are similar and scores are independent of each other were followed for the paired t-tests and one-way ANOVA tests. All post hoc tests were made using Tukey tests.

Additional information

Funding

The National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States of America funded this project (Award #1135260).