A Survey of Environmental Attitudes and Knowledge of University Undergraduate Students for the Purpose of Faculty Development in Teaching and Learning for Sustainability
University of North Carolina, Pembroke
Description
Because today's students will confront global climate change and its concomitant social and cultural disruption, it is vital that they graduate with ecological knowledge, environmental ethics, and civic skills commensurate to these challenges. This study randomly selected 180 undergraduate students enrolled at a highly diverse, socioeconomically disadvantaged, historically minority-serving institution to complete the New Environmental Revised Paradigm (NEP-R) and the National Environmental Educational Foundation (NEETF)/Roper 2000 surveys of environmental attitudes and knowledge. This study finds incomplete environmental knowledge and moderate to somewhat negative explicit environmental attitudes. This study informs researchers' efforts to develop, implement, and assess university-level class- and course-based interventions that seek to improve environmental knowledge and foster positive environmentally explicit attitudes.