Influence of Field Trips on Adolescent Environmental Stewardship: Examining the Role of the Dominant Social Paradigm

Promoting environmental stewardship among youths is crucial for inspiring collaborative, multi-generational actions to tackle long-term environmental challenges. This research study explores the impact of an environmental education (EE) field trip, which highlighted wastewater management and renewable energy technology, on high school students using the revised new ecological paradigm (NEP) scale as a key metric in a pre-post survey, which uses traditionally pro (NEP) and anti (dominant social paradigm, DSP) conservationist statements to measure beliefs towards the environment. When applying the Wilcoxon signed-rank test (null hypothesis t = 0, no change) to the series of environmental stewardship action questions “___ is an extremely important part of protecting the environment”, we identified ten out of the thirteen scale questions to show significant change, all of which were positive. Additionally, the overall impact score was positive and significant (p ≤ 0.05). This finding demonstrates that respondents felt more strongly that these variables played a role in protecting the environment after experiencing the field trip. This suggests that exposure to environmental management intervention strategies utilizing man-made infrastructure and technology may enhance human capability to positively influence the environment and mitigate environmental threats, potentially alleviating concerns about environmental issues. These results suggest that environmental stewardship in youth needs to be reconceptualized in an increasingly STEM-focused world, and a new metric should be developed to assess environmental beliefs.