A Competence Model for Environmental Education

The goal of environmental education is ultimately to enable a person to strive for and to attain a more ecological way of life. Which factors have to be promoted to achieve this goal? A study published in "Environment and Behavior" concludes that while environmental knowledge has a modest behavioral effect, the attitude toward nature is the stronger determinant of behavior. The four authors - including Franz X. Bogner, Chair of Biology Didactic at the University of Bayreuth - worked with data from 1900 students and studied the interdependence of different types of environmental knowledge, the attitude toward nature as well as the ecological behavior using and evaluating an established competence model.