Abstract:
Environmental problems are increasingly affecting the economic, health and
welfare of our society. Because of this, our collective ability to knowledgably deal with
issues of the environment is essential. For example, the Commonwealth of Virginia
amended its constitution to include protections for “its atmosphere, lands, and waters
from pollution, impairment, or destruction, for the benefit, enjoyment, and general
welfare of the people of the Commonwealth.” (Virginia Const. art. XI, § 1) Creating
youth who are literate about the environment and assessing this environmental literacy
(EL), is vital to our realization of this responsibility.
This thesis analyzes the acquisition of three components of environmental literacy
environmental knowledge, dispositions and action strategies (Roth, 1992) that result from
biology and/or earth science courses taught in a suburban Northern Virginia high school. Students at this school who had taken biology and earth science courses based on the
Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL) were surveyed for environmental knowledge,
dispositions and knowledge of action strategies using appropriate sections of the
Secondary School Environmental Literacy Assessment Instrument (Marcinkowski and
Rehrig, 1995). Comparison of means was conducted to determine what, if any, influence
these courses have on these components of EL.
Significantly higher environmental sensitivity, an indicator of environmental
dispositions, was found in students who had taken only biology when compared to
students who took biology and earth science. Similarly, higher ecological knowledge was
measured in students who had taken biology only as compared to those who had taken
both courses. When course level was taken into account, students who took general level
biology and general level earth science had lower environmental sensitivity than five of
the other seven combinations of courses and lower total scores on environmental
dispositions than two of the combinations. No significant differences were found between
results of this study and results from the field test of the (SSELI) in 1995.
Recommendations will be made based on these results which include the argument for a
more organized direct treatment of EL within a single course and continued research to
investigate EL within courses that more directly address components of EL.
