Motivation in environmental education: Supporting middle school students' motives for helping the Chesapeake Bay.

Abstract

This dissertation explores student motivation in environmental education. Motivation concerns the reasons why people choose to engage in various behaviors. Because a major aim of environmental education is to encourage engagement in behaviors that help the environment, an understanding of students' motivations is pertinent for informing environmental education theory and practice intended to foster commitments to environmentally responsible behaviors. Currently, environmental education emphasizes fostering students' motives related directly to the environment (e.g., caring about nature) but does not give much consideration to the broader range of student goals that may be connected with environmental learning and helping. Building on Kaplan and Kaplan's Reasonable Person Model and Clary et al.'s Functional Approach to Motivation, this dissertation explores two main questions. First, if students' motivational goals are supported through environmental education experiences, are they more likely to report intentions to help the environment in the future? Second, what motives are important to students? These questions are addressed based on analyses of quantitative and qualitative data collected with 2,365 middle school students and 37 middle school teachers who participated in combinations of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's curriculum, service-learning, and field trip programs. Three themes emerged. (1) Middle school students who fulfill personal goals through their environmental education experiences report greater commitments to learning about and helping the environment in the future. (2) Students share basic human motives, but they bring different motivational interests, preferences, and expertise with them to environmental education situations. (3) Although environmental education experiences have the potential to help students achieve their motivational goals, motive support in environmental education is not automatic. These themes form the basis for recommendations for ways environmental education can support middle school students' motivations and goals related to learning and understanding, meaningful participation, social affiliation, competence, and autonomy.