The potential for humans to influence Earth's climate was theorized by scientists like Svante Arrhenius as early as 1896. Yet, as late as 2020, political leaders, like the former President Donald Trump, and the people who follow them continue to doubt the possibility. With growing scientific evidence that human activities are degrading our…

A service-learning project was completed in both a senior and sophomore-level analytical chemistry course. Both projects took place at a local wetland managed by a nonprofit volunteer group. The two classes performed an in-depth water quality analysis and soil/sediment extractions examining the spatial variation of nutrients. The senior-level…

Hope is an important component that helps engage people in solving problems. Environmental educational resources addressing climate change effectively should ideally nurture hope as well as increase understanding about the issue. However, hopefulness about resolving climate change challenges is a relatively new construct in the literature and…

An instructional research-like multiweek laboratory project for a second-semester introductory general chemistry laboratory course has been developed. The ultrasonic-assisted synthesis method using low cost commercial ultrasonic cleaners has the convenience of running multiple students' reactions simultaneously. Taking advantage of short reaction…

To determine how Extension educators can use environmental education materials to develop life skills in youths, we correlated a national environmental education curriculum developed by Project Learning Tree (PLT) to the 4-H Life Skills Wheel. Youth development professionals can use the resulting correlations to determine which life skills the…

Sociology has been slow in responding to the challenge of climate change. In this conversation, we advocate adding more climate change content to Introduction to Sociology courses. To support our arguments, we present data from a content analysis of the top 11 best-selling introductory textbooks in the United States, demonstrating that…

Curricular change within the chemistry curriculum is often difficult and slow, in part because there are numerous specific barriers to implementation. However, a larger issue is that the curriculum, and the institutions that it is connected with, are complex systems. In the implementation of a new green chemistry curriculum for the organic…

Two senior undergraduate students within the environmental science division at Stephen F. Austin State University (SFASU) quantitatively diagnosed the environmental, ecological, and socioeconomic dynamics involved in plastic recycling. This study incorporated actively collecting recycled plastic bottles on campus to produce an enumerated analysis…

This article aims to introduce a view of scaling as a learning process. In the article we discuss the concept of 'scaling up' or 'scaling' of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) activities on the basis of how 'scaling up' ESD is highlighted in the UNESCO Global Action Programme (GAP) on ESD. Drawing on a Deweyan theory of learning as…

Environmental education (EE) practitioners struggle to consistently and rigorously evaluate their programs, particularly when little time is available for evaluation. Since environmental literacy (EL) is the goal of environmental education, a very short EL instrument -- amenable to use when longer tests are not practical for practitioners -- would…

Social and cultural practices in learning settings are sites for leveraging and/or remediating sustainable and just conceptions of nature-culture relations to meet changing environmental demands of twenty-first century. In this study, we examine epistemic navigation among Indigenous youth in an outdoor, land based, STEAM (science, education, arts,…

The present article gravitates around the radical dilemma in which the evolution of the current human civilization has placed us. This route derives from certain global problems, such as most notably climate change, which have exacerbated the magnitude and complexity of the known socio-environmental problems. Avoiding the most extreme scenarios…

Environmental issues needed a lot of attention especially from high school students, and their skill in solving environmental problem is important for the future. This research was aimed to discover a profile of students' analytical skills toward environmental issues. Three hundred twenty-nine high school students in coastal area are involved.…

Agricultural and environmental scientists collaborated with educational technology researchers to create multimedia learning tools to fill gaps in student understanding of key concepts that undergraduates often struggle with, including sorption, cation exchange capacity, inner and outer sphere bonding, and soil system complexity. These resources…

The purpose of this study was to (a) understand how students view similar issues from a local vs. a global perspective, and (b) to document how a science-based class can change opinion about environmental issues. A total of 8,523 students provided opinions to three paired statements about deforestation, over-population, and pollution at the…