By: Arthur Hall
Submitted: 2010-10-24 03:46:37 | Word Count: 679
Environmental education (EE) programs make use of local ecosystems surrounding a school such as city parks, rivers, or urban gardens. EE activities provide opportunities for active engagement, skills building, and application of knowledge to real-world problems. Many progressive schools around the world are now incorporating EE activities within their curricula, and this nascent movement, while still relatively small, is generating large academic benefits.
Environmental Education Increases Standardized Test Scores
The State Education and Environmental Roundtable, a U.S. national study of environment-based education encompassing 150 schools throughout 16 states over the course of 10 years, has found that making use of local environments to enhance learning can produce gains on standardized test scores and overall grade-point averages in science, math, language arts, and social studies. In fact, students in EE schools or programs have outscored their peers in traditional schools and programs on the majority of assessments.
The academic benefits of environmental education are evident in the following examples:
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Hotchkiss Elementary (Dallas, Texas) – Fourth-graders in an EE program scored 13% higher on average in reading skills than fourth-graders at the same school before the implementation of the program.
Hawley Environmental Elementary School (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) – All third-graders at this school passed the Wisconsin Reading Comprehension Test, compared to just 25% of their peers in other traditional schools throughout Milwaukee.
Environmental Middle School (Portland Oregon) – 96% of eighth-grade students meet or exceed the state’s math standards, compared to just 65% of those in similar but non-environment-based middle schools.
Isaac Dickson Elementary School (Asheville, North Carolina) – Fourth graders in an EE program increased their math scores by 31% in a single year. This is particularly impressive, given that a significant percentage of Isaac Dickson students live in housing projects and half come from low-income families.
Environmental Education Increases Student Engagement
It is well known that student engagement is critical to academic achievement. Anecdotal evidence from educators indicates that EE increases student motivation and interest, thus awakening a love of learning in students who were once weak performers. This is particularly important for students of low socioeconomic status, who often have poor academic prospects. According to Jane Eller of the Kentucky Environmental Education Council, as a result of the incorporation of EE activities, “In just a few years, we’ve begun to see schools from some of our poorest neighborhoods do very well on the assessment.”
This effect has been seen at many schools that have incorporated EE activities into their curricula. For example, Kruse Elementary of Pasadena, Texas, where poverty is ubiquitous and 87% of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, a teacher named Libby Rhoden began providing environmental education to her first-graders. The result has been that Rhoden’s students consistently outperform their peers from other classes in both reading and math.
Examples of Environmental Education Programs
EE encompasses a wide variety of activities. The following are a few examples of the ways in which various schools have incorporated EE within their curricula:
Kimbark Elementary (San Bernardino, California) – An on-campus vegetable garden, pond, greenhouse, and native plant arboretum are used to study botany, aquatic insects, and microscopic organisms.
Glenwood Springs High School (Glenwood Springs, Colorado) – High school students had the opportunity to create an urban pocket park, producing all the plans and supervising the development.
Huntingdon Area Middle School (Huntingdon, Pennsylvania) – Local streams provide a place to gather data that is used for teaching various mathematical concepts, including statistics, percentages, and fractions, as well as graph and chart interpretation.
Isaac Dickson (Asheville, North Carolina) – Students learn about nutrition by growing their own food products in the garden and then studying them, after which they create nutritious meals to share at the school or donate the produce to local social service organizations.
Taylor County High School (Perry, Florida) – The nearby Econfina River is used to teach science, math, language arts, and economics.
School for Environmental Studies (Apple Valley, Minnesota) – Students complete pond profile projects, which involve sampling and testing water, analyzing plants and insects, collecting historical and scientific data about the way the land evolved, and learning about the area’s previous human inhabitants.
