The importance of environmental education in students: analyzing the transition from middle school to high school in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, México.

Abstract

A research was conducted with 246 first-semester high school students in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico with the aim of discovering if they had received extracurricular environmental education during middle school and how this training could influence their perceptions and positions towards environmental topics. Only 167 participants reported receiving extracurricular environmental education in middle school. The other 79 participants admitted not having done so. The same questionnaire with sentences on water culture, recycling, species care and transportation, as well as on the general knowledge of the environment and its regulations was applied to all the students. SPSS was used to categorize the two groups and perform nonparametric Mann-Whitney tests, which revealed that students who received additional environmental education in middle school showed a better attitude towards water care. To interpret our results, it is necessary to consider that the study was conducted only in the city of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas and that a convenience sampling was used. Our findings also showed that there are still students who do not get enough environmental education. We conclude that it is important to intensify efforts to change this situation, since training on the environment has been shown to positively influence the attitudes of the students who received it.