An Assessment of the Efficacy of an Experiential Component within a Classroom-based Middle School Environmental Education Curriculum

Abstract

In this study the author sought to examine the effectiveness of experiential environmental education in a sixth grade classroom. Classroom instruction was provided to a control group and an experiential component was added to classroom instruction for an experimental group. A test of the author's design was used as a pretest and post test. The post test was given twice: At the conclusion of instruction and at 6 months. Using a Paired Student's t test, differences were determined between the test scores for both groups. Only the experimental group had a statistically significant score increase between the pretest and first post test. However, at the six month post test the increase disappeared. Further studies are needed to determine the long-term effectiveness of discrete instructional units of environmental education and efforts should be made to incorporate environmental education across the K-12 curriculum in order to promote the development of responsible environmental behaviors.