The impact of educational strategies on primary school students’ attitudes towards climate change: A comparison of three European countries

Abstract

Climate education is becoming a key educational issue of our time. This also brings with it increased demands for educational research in this area. One important question is how climate attitudes are constructed to support students’ willingness to act towards climate change. In this paper, we explore how participatory, holistic and community-based learning approaches influence the construction of climate attitudes in school students from the Czech Republic, Portugal, and the UK (n=473; M=13.49 years). Students’ perceptions of different educational strategies were nearly the same across countries. Girls perceive holistic, values-based teaching more strongly. Of the strategies studied, holistic education has the greatest influence on the formation of climate attitudes (β=0.34 for climate change beliefs, β=0.32 for climate change intentions), and community-based teaching has a partial influence (β=0.13 for climate change intentions). It is thus the use of holistic and community-based educational approaches that is key to the successful implementation of climate education.