Regular Article
Can school environmental education programs make children and parents more pro-environmental?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2022.103032Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Changing people's attitudes is an important first step in addressing environmental issues.

  • This paper evaluates the effects of an environmental education campaign.

  • We find a sizeable effect on children's knowledge, attitudes, and practices.

  • However, we do not find any evidence of a spillover effect on the parents' behavior.

  • Then, interventions targeting children should be reinforced in various ways to achieve long-term impacts.

Abstract

We evaluate the direct and indirect effects of an environmental educational program with value-laded content on children's and parents' knowledge, attitudes and practices regarding the consumption and disposal of plastics.We do this using a randomized field experiment targeting fourth-grade children in Chile.The educational program had a sizeable and a positive impact on children’ knowledge, attitudes, and practices, but no effect on parents' behavior.Heterogeneous effects indicate that the program had a larger effect among children in more vulnerable schools, but there was still no effect on parents.Finally, because parents may ultimately determine what constitutes acceptable behavior for children, promoting permanent changes in behavior will require interventions of this sort to be complemented with other initiatives targeting parents.

Introduction

For many environmental problems, changing people's attitudes and norms—and the resulting behavioral changes—is an important first step in addressing the problem.This is particularly important in settings where there are limited possibilities to use standard policy instruments, like when actions are not easily observable.While how to best affect attitudes and norms is not straightforward, we do know that the process of forming attitudes and norms starts at a young age and that experiences and education are likely to shape us as human beings.

In this paper we investigate the direct and indirect effects of an environmental education campaign targeting 9 to 10-year-old school children on pro-environmental attitudes and behavior.The target audience of this campaign is school children, but we incorporate the children's parents/guardians as a secondary object of study.Children develop pro-social and altruistic preferences at a rather young age (Fehr et al., 2013; Sutter et al., 2019), exhibiting pro-environmental preferences and behavior of their own (Dewey, 2021; Grønhøj and Thøgersen, 2009).There is also evidence that these types of preferences can be affected by various interventions (Bettinger and Slonim, 2006; Kosse et al., 2020).There are abundant examples of research that evaluates educational campaigns on students' academic performance (e.g., Angrist et al., 2002), but our focus is not on test performance.Instead, we look at actual attitudes and practices related to pro-environmental behavior, and how those attitudes and practices are affected by knowledge about environmental problems.

The first contribution of this paper is that we experimentally test how an environmental education campaign with value-laden content affects school children's knowledge, attitudes, and practices (hereinafter KAP) regarding the use and handling of plastic products.We do this by implementing a comprehensive environmental education campaign in a sample group of schools and measuring KAP before and after treatment in both the treated and control schools.We extend the mainly laboratory experimental work on pro-social behavior among children (see, e.g., Harbaugh and Krause 2000; Sutter et al., 2019) by conducting a field experiment on how to affect pro-environmental behavior.There are a number of studies on the effects of information and education on pro-environmental behavior (Hartley et al., 2015, 2018; Hoang and Kato, 2016; Owens, 2018).These are often evaluations of smaller campaigns and are primarily comparisons of behavior and attitudes before and after, without a proper counterfactual.Our experimental evaluation is therefore an important contribution to understanding the effect of environmental education on pro-social preferences.

Second, our intervention is novel in that it links the environmental education campaign with a strong appeal to personal norms.Normative information has been proved to generate a larger impact on pro-environmental behavior, compared with plane information provision (Huber et al., 2018; De Groot et al., 2013; Viscusi et al., 2011).Particularly, personal norms appear to be more suitable to promote pro-environmental behavior when dealing with unobserved individual actions such as plastic pollution (De Groot et al., 2021).Our experiment is a value-laden education campaign targeting parents and children.Since society is in agreement regarding the need to reduce the flow of plastics into the ocean, we could safely include a very salient injunctive norm of behavior (Jambeck et al., 2015).

Third, our experimental design allows us to investigate the potential heterogeneity of the treatment effect according to different school characteristics, thus capturing inequality of opportunities at an early age.There are several experimental studies supporting the heterogeneous effects of informational and educational campaigns on educational outcomes when accounting for the initial conditions and socioeconomic background, with mixed results (McGuigan et al., 2016; Avitabile and de Hoyos, 2018; Bonilla-Mejía et al., 2019).However, these experiments were not directly designed to evaluate any of these characteristics, which means that their results are only suggestive.The Chilean education system offers an interesting setting to test the heterogeneous effects of school type.In this system, parents and guardians are free to choose the school their child will attend.There are two types of schools: public schools, which are funded entirely by the government, and private and semiprivate schools, which are privately funded.As this latter option involves payment on the part of the parent/guardian, it is often the choice of wealthier families.This system has been shown to generate a profound socioeconomic stratification in educational achievement and inequality (Torche, 2005; Mizala and Torche, 2012; Zancajo, 2019).

The fourth contribution of this paper is that we investigate if there is any transfer in KAP from school children to their parents.We do this by also measuring the KAP of the parents before and after the educational campaign in both the treated and control schools.Intergenerational transmission of preferences has been investigated extensively in areas such as human capital (Black et al., 2005), generosity (Wilhelm et al., 2008), happiness (Carlsson et al., 2014), risk and trust (Dohmen et al., 2012) and pro-environmental behavior (Grønhøj and Thøgersen, 2009; Leppänen et al., 2012; Meeusen, 2014; Casaló and Escario, 2016; Collado et al., 2017).The focus of that literature, though, has been on the transmission of preferences from parents to children.For example, literature on pro-environmental behavior supports a positive correlation between children's and parents' environmental behavior (Grønhøj and Thøgersen, 2009; Matthies et al., 2012).However, in the case of educating children, the direction of the effect could be the opposite, where the knowledge learned by children could change the values and beliefs of their parents (Duvall and Zint, 2007).Environmental education programs directed at children may promote transfer of environmental knowledge, attitudes, and behavior to adults (e.g., Ekström, 2007; Grønhøj, 2006; Lawson et al., 2018; Williams et al., 2017; Boudet et al., 2016; Maddox et al., 2011; Larsson et al., 2010).Our experimental design allows us to test the hypothesis of whether preferences are being transferred from children to parents.

The educational program we implemented is an environmental education module.Our intervention is adapted from the content and curricula of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOOA) marine debris program (NOAA, 2015).Marine debris is a global issue that negatively impacts oceans, wildlife and potentially humans.One important contributor to marine debris is the use of single-use plastics, which are used not only by adults in daily activities but also by children, for example in the packaging of their lunchboxes.The contents of the program was reinforced with messages, activities and homework that appeal to personal norms.We hypothesize that by being exposed to personal normative information, children will develop personal values towards the importance of reducing marine debris, and thus, the program will not only increase their knowledge in this subject, but also generate changes in behavior, measured by attitudes and practices regarding consumption and disposal of plastics.

Homework was designed to involve the parents, indirectly making them aware of the program.This program was implemented at a set of schools in central-southern Chile.To account for the behavior of children and parents at home before and after the intervention, we implemented ex-ante and ex-post surveys for both children and parents.The set of control schools, chosen as a matched sample of the treated schools, was only visited twice to gather the ex-ante and ex-post KAP measurements.

We find that this program had a positive and sizeable effect on children's knowledge, attitudes, and practices.Results are robust to unmatched regressions, and when accounting for unanticipated events like social unrest in Chile and COVID-19.Thus, our results clearly show that educational campaigns and other types of interventions can affect pro-environmental preferences (Grodzinska-Jurczak et al., 2003; Bettinger and Slonim, 2006; Duvall and Zint, 2007; Hartley et al., 2015; Boudet et al., 2016; Hoang and Kato, 2016).We also find that the effect of the intervention was even larger among children attending public schools, meaning the program promoted pro-environmental behavior among children in more disadvantageous economic situations.

However, we do not find any evidence of a spillover effect on the parents' attitudes, knowledge, or practices.Results from previous studies on intergenerational transmission of environmental education programs reveal mixed results, although most studies have found a positive effect.Leeming et al.(1997) evaluated the Caretaker Classroom Program in schools in the US and found that the program positively and significantly affected students' attitudes toward the environment.Parents indirectly influenced by their children's activities in the program also displayed more pro-environmental behavior.A positive effect on parents' attitudes and behavior has been found in a few previous other studies as well (see, e.g., Ballantyne et al., 2001; Vaughan et al., 2003).More recently, Singh et al.(2020) evaluated an environmental education program called “The Green Schools Program” in twelve schools in India.They found no significant impact of the program on parents' environmental perceptions.Thus, our results on spillover effects are not in line with the majority of previous studies.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows.Sections 2 presents the experimental design in detail.The empirical strategy is presented in section 3.Main results are presented in section 4, and in section 5 we report results from a set of robustness checks.Finally, section 6 provides the main conclusions and policy recommendations.

The data and code for reproducing all analyses in this study are available at the project's Open Science Framework page: https://osf.io/[to be made public upon publication].

Section snippets

Experimental design

The experimental design and pre-analysis plan were formally registered with the American Economic Association's registry for randomized controlled trials (AEARCTR-0004650) and formally approved on August 30, 2019.Our experimental design strictly followed the methodology and activities stated in the Pre-analysis Plan, which was registered prior to the start of data collection.

Empirical strategy

The empirical strategy of this study is based on reduced form specifications.The estimate of interest is the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) in the population of children/parents enrolled in schools participating in our program.The ATE is the expected effect of the treatment on a randomly selected individual from the population and is defined as α = E [yit1yit0], where yit1 and yit0 are the potential outcomes for child/parent i's behavior regarding plastic consumption and disposal before and

Homogeneous treatment effects

We begin with analyzing the direct effects of the environmental education program on the knowledge, attitudes, and practices of the children.Estimates corresponding to the primary specification given by Equation (1) are reported in Table 3.

There is a positive, sizeable, and statistically significant effect on the school children's KAP regarding the use and disposal of plastics.Note that all dependent variables are indices ranging from zero to one, so that the coefficients can be interpreted as

Robustness checks

In this section we investigate the robustness of our main results.We focus on two issues: (i) differences in pre-treatment covariates and (ii) unanticipated events.

Conclusions

Plastic pollution is a global issue with local origins, and its consequences on marine ecosystems are potentially severe.The problem originates from the consumption and production decisions of households and businesses that rely excessively on plastic packaging (e.g., bag and containers) and plastic utensils (e.g., straws, cutlery).While improved waste management and recycling are part of the solution, reducing plastic consumption and improving disposal practices are necessary.This paper

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgment

Authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from SIDA through the Sustainable Management of Coastal Marine Resources (EfD-CMaR), from project FONDAP [No. 1522A0004] and FONDAP [No.15110027] and from CAPES through ANID PIA/BASAL FB0002.

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