Factors determining environmentalism in students of primary and secondary schools based on a large-scale survey of the Sustainability Thematic Week 2021

Abstract

Day by day, more research is confirming that we are not only approaching, but also crossing the threshold of the path to the ecological crisis. Hence the implementation and promotion of school programs to support sustainability education is extremely important today. Many countries have been evaluating the effectiveness of these sustainability programs for decades, while in Hungary this topic is in its infancy. This study presents the results based on the students’ questionnaires filled in in 2021 in the framework of the “Students and Teachers on Sustainability” research program launched in the Carpathian Basin within the framework of the Sustainability Thematic Week (STW). The latter has been running since 2016. We present a comparison of the schools of the responding students with the national distribution data of the schools. Furthermore, based on several indicators developed to measure environmentalism (e.g. NEP scale, Nature Relatedness scale, variables measuring various aspects of pro-environmental behaviour), we present the socio-demographic and socio-economic variables related to environmentalism in Hungarian students. According to our results, among the schools participating in the STW program, especially in the case of secondary schools, the most represented groups are from the most developed regions and big cities. Students participating in the survey have a higher socio-cultural background than the national average. In the case of the participants’ secondary schools, the pedagogical work is also outstanding. Concerning environmentalism, the effect of gender and sociocultural background proved to be the strongest among the examined background factors, while the effect of age was also considerable in the case of primary school students. For both age groups, the increase in the number of IT devices in the family was associated with weaker indicators of environmentalism, while student participation in the STW program was associated with better indicators of environmentalism.