Some Environmental Education Programs Increase Connections to Nature

Much recent political will in the United States has been directed toward increasing Americans' experience in nature – think, for example, of President Obama's “America's Great Outdoors Initiative.” Two of the assumptions behind such initiatives are that increased exposure to nature will lead to a feeling of connection to nature, and that the connection will in turn lead to conservation-oriented attitudes and behaviors. This study investigates the first assumption: does participation in EE programs increase children's connectedness to nature?

The authors studied seven EE programs run by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in different parts of the United States. The programs were selected for maximum diversity and difference in participant age, program type, and program duration, with the goal of making the results widely relevant. The authors conducted pre- and post- experience surveys with two groups of students at each site: one group of students who participated in the EE program, and a second control group of students at the same school who did not participate in the EE program.

The authors used two sets of questions to measure connectedness to nature. One set included 16 questions that had been used and refined in a variety of contexts by other researchers; the second set included 11 questions developed for this study. To assess whether the EE programs affected connectedness to nature, the authors compared responses of students in the groups that had attended the EE programs with those who had not attended; they used the pre-test data to account for any differences in students' initial levels of connectedness to nature.

The authors found no differences in 'connectedness to nature' as measured by the pre-existing group of questions. Using the group of questions created for this study, the authors found modest differences in two of the seven programs – they found that students' connectedness to nature increased following the EE experience. The two programs for which degrees of connectedness changed shared two characteristics: participants were the same age (third and fourth graders), and the programs both had a “time-frame of sufficient duration” (e.g., a week-long day camp).

The authors point out numerous limitations of this work (e.g., the fact that the EE experiences weren't randomly assigned, so the groups who attended the programs weren't necessarily equal in all other respects to those who did not), and so greatly caution against drawing solid conclusions from their results. They do, however, suggest that two factors may be critical for the ability of EE programs to foster connectedness to nature: time (duration) and age.

That time (program duration) seems to be an important factor is supported by both the literature and case-based analysis of this study's results. Literature suggests that change in connectedness to nature “requires long-term or repeated experience;” this study's results support that claim. The age of students also may be important. Literature suggests that early exposure to nature, in particular time spent in nature before the age of 11, is especially important. The two programs that exhibited changes were those with the youngest of all study participants; students in these two programs were in third and fourth grade; other study participants were in grades 5 through 12.