Project GREEN: The Effect of Gardening on Environmental Attitudes of Elementary School Students

Abstract

Project GREEN (Garden Resources for Environmental Education Now!) is an educational tool to assist in the teaching of environmental education at the elementary school level. Project GREEN is different from many current educational practices because its major goal is to provide an interdisciplinary approach to environmental education by infusing activities centered around a hands-on tool, “the garden.” The main goal of this project included evaluating whether students participating in Project GREEN were developing positive environmental attitudes. Three schools throughout Texas participated in the study. Approximately 200 students were evaluated; 100 participants served as the experimental group and 100 non-participants served as the control group. Students were evaluated using the Children's Environmental Response Inventory (CERI), which measures students' attitudes about nature and human dominance over nature. This questionnaire also contained a section for biographical information. Comparisons were made between the experimental and control groups, as well as between gender, age, ethnicity, and time in the garden. Results examine the relationship between the garden program and environmental attitudes for both control and experimental groups.