WHY ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION IS IMPORTANT

“Environmental education provides students with important opportunities to engage with real-world issues that extend beyond the classroom. They can see the relevance of classroom learning to the complex environmental issues facing our planet and can gain the skills they need to become creative problem solvers and powerful advocates.”

Environmental education benefits students, schools, and our larger world.

Environmental education benefits students in the following ways…

Improve academic performance. Environmental education improves test scores by providing students with interesting lessons about the natural world that can be applied across all subjects and grade levels.

Break the indoor habit. Environmental education provides an antidote to the “plugged-in” lives of today’s generation, the first to grow up indoors. Children who experience a schoolyard or play area with a diverse natural environment are more active, more focused on nutrition, more creative, and more civil to each other.

Improve student health. Environmental education gets students outdoors and helps address health issues common among today’s children, such as obesity, attention deficit disorder, and depression.

Environmental education provides a fun platform for acquiring and applying knowledge and skills in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

Meet 21st century needs. Environmental education emphasizes skills necessary for success in the future world, such as asking questions, investigating, defining problems, analyzing, explaining, reasoning, drawing conclusions, and solving problems.

Develop leadership skills. Emphasizes learning in collaboration with others, critical thinking, and discussion, and focuses on action strategies with real-world applications.

Improve concentration and cognitive skills. Improved students’ concentration and boosted their cognitive abilities. Children with attention deficit disorder also benefit from more exposure to nature – the greener the children’s daily environment, the easier their symptoms were to manage.

Environmental Education Benefits Schools and Educators by…

• Develop enthusiastic students. Provides rich, hands-on, authentic, and real-life learning opportunities across the curriculum. This relevance to students’ lives engages and inspires students more than traditional instructional methods.

• Develop innovative teacher leaders. Gives educators the confidence to take students outdoors and design more dynamic, interactive learning experiences that inspire student engagement.

• Meets academic standards. Provides an engaging way to meet the content and skills identified in the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Math, as well as the Next Generation Science Standards and the Social Studies C3 Framework.

• Saves schools money. When students investigate and take action to improve the environmental performance of school buildings and grounds, they often cut costs on electricity, water, waste management, and more.

Environmental Education Benefits the Larger World by…

• Fostering Healthier Schools. empowers students to lead the way in creating greener and healthier learning environments inside and outside their school buildings.

• Supporting Sound Decision-Making. ensures citizens are informed about sound science and equipped to make decisions that are critical to ensuring the US and greater world have the natural resources on which our economy and quality of life depend.

• Contributing to Sustainability. builds the knowledge and skills needed to address complex environmental issues, as well as take action to keep our natural world healthy, our economies productive, and communities vibrant.

• Conserving our Natural Resources. Higher levels of environmental knowledge correlate significantly with a higher degree of pro-environment and conservation behavior. The more people know, the more likely they are to recycle, be energy efficient, conserve water, etc.