Can eco-schools improve elementary school students’ environmental literacy levels?

Research Design

This study is adopted a quasi-experimental design. The participants were distributed into experimental and control groups. Experimental group (EG) received eco-school application and control group (CG) received traditional school application through spring semester of 2008-2009 academic year.

Participants:

Participants of the study consisted of 316 students’ enrolling to 6th, 7th and 8th grades of two private schools in an urban area of Turkey. For each grade level, there are one EG and one CG. The EG included totally 156 students (84 boys and 72 girls), and the CG included 160 students (92 boys and 68 girls). The distribution of the sample according to gender and grade level is given in Table 1.

Table1. Demographic Characteristics of Participants
	EG		CG		Total
	Boys	Girls	Boys	Girls	Total
6th grade	40	30	28	19	117
7th grade	27	18	38	35	118
8th grade	17	24	26	14	81
Total	84	72	92	68	316

Data Collection Instruments

Elementary school students’ environmental literacy was measured by administering the Environmental Literacy Questionnaire (ELQ) developed by Kaplowitz and Levine (2005) and translated and adapted into Turkish by Tuncer, Tekkaya, Sungur, Çakıroğlu, Ertepınar and Kaplowitz (2009). The questionnaire includes 45 closed-ended questions which make it easy to use, score and code for statistical analysis. The questionnaire includes questions covering four components of environmental literacy; environmental knowledge, attitudes, uses and concerns. The knowledge component of the instrument includes questions about the understanding of the basic ecological principles that are related with the environment. The environmental attitude items targeted respondents’ feelings related to the environment and environmental problems, while the environmental use items measured respondents’ intention to take part in environmentally responsible behaviours. Environmental use statements, aim to determine the ways in which human beings make use of and manage land, trees, animals, plants and water. The concern items focus on participants’ sensitivity toward environmental problems and issues. Tuncer et al. found internal consistency of the environmental knowledge, attitudes, uses, and concern item sets to be .88, .64, .80 and .88, respectively, using Cronbach alpha. In the present study, the internal consistency values for each subscale were calculated as .78, .60, .86 and .90 respectively.

Data Collection

The ELQ was applied as the pre-test and post-test to both EGs and CGs. Eco-school and traditional school teachers’ administered the instrument as a regular process of lessons. Before administration, on a meeting with teachers, the researcher explained the purpose of the study and how the instrument should be applied in classrooms. To ensure confidentiality of the data, students were told not to write their names on the papers. Students were assured that there will be no grading involved for this or any of the activities in this study and their participation would in no way influence their grades.

Procedure:

Applications in Experimental Group: Eco-School Applications

Step 1- Forming the Eco-School Committee: At the very beginning of the application, a meeting was conducted with all teachers and administrators of the school. In this meeting a detailed description of the study was made with a presentation, handbooks prepared for the teachers were distributed, five eco-teams (Healthy Living, Energy, Waste and Recycle, Water, School Building and School Ground) were formed and two volunteer teachers were assigned for each group. Co-director of the school who is also physical education teacher was chosen as the leader of eco-school committee. After this meeting, the study was announced to all students. All the teachers informed students in their classrooms and volunteer students (10-15 students) were assigned for each team. After that, each team made meetings separately and determined how they are going to conduct the environmental review.

Step 2- Carrying Out an Environmental Review: Students in eco-teams carried out an environmental review with their leader teachers to form a realistic picture of school’s current situation. For a detailed and organized environmental review, the leader teachers prepared a set of questions that should guide the review and students and the leader teachers determined the places they have to examine. For example; Healthy Living Eco-team decided to examine the restrooms, canteen, refectory and all classrooms. During the environmental review students took notes and determined the existing problems. Each eco-team tried to find out answers to several questions during the environmental review. Each environmental review took approximately 4-5 hours totally and conducted in 3-5 days. Since students were from different classrooms and grade levels, the environmental review held in free hours of students.

Step 3- Developing an Action Plan: After carrying out the environmental review and determining the needs of the school, teachers and students from each eco-team came together and determined an action plan for each team. These plans were developed using the results of environmental review. In these plans, actions the teams are going to take to improve environmental performance were listed. The teams examined the environmental review, decided which ones they can improve then determined a deadline to complete the task. In the action plan the teams also decided timetable for each action ranging from a few weeks to a few months. The action plans the teams developed were announced to whole school community by eco-school board. After completing the action plan they started the tasks they determined.

Step 4- Monitoring and Evaluating: After some time passed in the application, eco-teams assessed their progress towards the targets that have been established. In a meeting they checked their action plans, their timing and the actions they were able to take. During these meetings several modifications were made in the timescales and targets. Monitoring the process was a very effective strategy for teachers; by this way they were able to include environmental activities into their lessons at the same time with the actions that eco-team members took. To evaluate the process there are several steps suggested by FEE such as; measuring the school’s ecological footprint, meter readings and calculation of energy bill savings, before, during and after photographs, using questionnaires and surveys to canvass opinions. Eco-teams preferred to take before, during and after photographs. All the teams presented their progress with photographs and shared with whole school by eco-school board.

Step 5- Linking to the Curriculum: In this step classroom activities about energy, waste and water are conducted by students. This step ensures integration of the whole school to the environmentally related activities. In this step, most of the work was done mostly by teachers; they planned and integrated several activities to their lessons. This may seem easy especially for science teachers but the most important part of this step was to integrate environmentally related activities to all disciplines.

Step 6- Involving the Whole School and Wider Community: One of the key aims of eco-schools is to success the whole school participation in environmental activities. Throughout the process whole school kept updated about the progress of the project by using eco-school board. Besides, to enable all students to participate in the project, teachers and the researcher designed several activities.

Step 7- Producing the Eco-Code: To state values and objectives what each eco-team striving to achieve, students determined their eco-codes and presented their eco-codes in eco-school board.

Applications in Control Group: Traditional School Applications

Students in control group were exposed to a learning environment wherein learning proceeded primarily through a traditional approach. Control group teachers generally used lecturing and questioning method during their instruction. Throughout the semester, the teachers in the control group explained the topic and asked several questions during the instruction. After explaining the topic, teachers mainly focus on solving multiple choice questions related with the topic. Except several issues related with environment and environmental problems teachers did not emphasis any related topic in courses. No additional environmental activities were done during the semester. All the courses were completed in the classrooms. Students did not plan and participate in any kind of environmental activities. Science teachers did not spend much time on topics related with environment, because they thought that environmental topics are really easy to learn for students. In the control group, environmental lessons are restricted to the classroom at the discretion of teachers.

Analysis of Data

The participants’ responses to the ELQ comprise the data set used for the analysis. Environmental knowledge part includes multiple choice questions. Scores for the knowledge part ranged from 0 (investigates no correct responses) to 11 (all correct responses). Environmental attitude and uses part include items with Likert-type responses. For positive statements 5 points were assigned to ‘strongly agree’, 4 to ‘agree’, 3 to ‘undecided’, 2 to ‘disagree’ and 1 to ‘strongly disagree. For the representation of the data strongly agree’ and ‘agree’ responses and ‘disagree’ and ‘strongly disagree’ responses were combined to give proportions of students who affirmed the data. Environmental concern part included nine environmental problems and Likert-type responses ranging from ‘very concerned’ to ‘not all concerned’. Similar with the attitudes and uses part, 5 points were assigned to ‘very concerned’, 4 to ‘concerned, 3 to ‘undecided’, 2 to ‘a little concerned’ and 1 to ‘not at all concerned’.

Responses to the different parts of the instrument were scored and recorded in Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 15.0. To analyze the data obtained from ELQ both descriptive statistics and inferential statistics were used. Descriptive statistics were used to identify students’ demographic characteristics, students’ self evaluation about their environmental concerns and knowledge, distribution of students’ pre- and post- responses for environmental knowledge, attitude, use and concern subscales. Inferential statistics were used to find out the relationship between independent variables (treatments, grade level and gender) and scores obtained subscales of environmental literacy. Independent samples t-test and one-way analysis of covariance (one-way ANCOVA) were used for inferential statistics. The results of the study reported to be significant at the p < .05 level statistical significance and medium effect size.