Date of Award

Spring 2021

Thesis Type

Open Access

Degree Name

Honors Bachelor of Arts

Department

Psychology

Sponsor

Alice Davidson

Committee Member

Rachelle Yankelevitz

Committee Member

Lee Lines

Abstract

The present study looked at the effects of a three-week environmental education program on preschoolers aged from three to five years old. Attitudes about the environment were measured using a questionnaire adapted from The Children’s Attitudes Towards the Environment - Preschool Version (Diamond & Musser, 1999), and knowledge was measured with an additional five questions about specific facts. Nine children from two different schools, Community School and Lab School, received the intervention of the environmental education program, and 15 children from both schools were in the control group. The main goal of this study was to see if participation in a brief, virtual environmental education program results in greater knowledge about the environment. Overall pre-test knowledge was statistically significantly associated with age (r = .46, p = .03), indicating that older children knew more at the pre-test than younger children. No statistically significant results were found between the control and intervention group for knowledge, and the attitudes portion of the questionnaire was not analyzed because of low reliability. The only statistically significant results were between Community School and Lab School, which was not the aim of the study, and with the small participant size it is unfair to make generalizations about the populations based on those findings.

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