Environmental education in Cabo Verde 215 These mixed responses to statements regarding environ-


mental attitudes could indicate a fault in the study design. Although self-completion questionnaires are often used as an effective method of data collection for large studies as the anonymity of this format encourages honest responses (Strange et al., 2003), in our study the use of questionnaires could have been a limitation. The young students may have struggled to understand the questionnaire (although a sim- pler questionnaire might have reduced the power of this data collection method). Students could have felt pressur- ized to answer in a certain way if they felt the questionnaire was in the format of an exam. Although we explained this was not the case, the first statement was ‘I like science les- sons’ and the students may have felt pressure within the classroom situation to give a high score to this question. The same concern could apply to the statements that re- quired honest responses, such as those regarding litter drop- ping. During the first round of questionnaires, students may have felt compelled to give more socially desirable answers (Milfont, 2009) because of the presence of repre- sentatives of the local conservation NGO in the class- room. Once they had completed the activity and realized it was not an exam, they may have felt more relaxed and so more able to answer honestly. Statements requiring honest responses might not be the optimal way of assessing the students’ views, and a more subjective method may be preferable, such as interviews or personal observations (Jahedi & Méndez, 2014; McIntyre & Milfont, 2016). Our second finding was that after the intervention stu-


dent aspirations about becoming involved with environ- mental issues seemed to have increased, but the children did not appear more inclined to continue to study science. This finding reinforces the link between effective environ- mental education and interest in conservation. Although the questionnaire included only two statements regarding future environmental activities, the responses to both statements significantly increased after the intervention: children were more inclined to want to volunteer with Maio Biodiversity Foundation and to consider working with the environment. This could be because outside orga- nizations entering schools may present new ideas and pro- vide a change to the usual curriculum, enabling them to motivate children to a greater extent than routine classroom activities (Fitzakerley et al., 2013). However, amore detailed questionnaire would be required to investigate this. Future studies could potentially include the use of a control group not exposed to the external intervention,. Our third finding was that student knowledge regarding


local environmental issues increased after the intervention. All three questions regarding local environmental issues sig- nificantly increased in score, and to a greater degree than the other attitude-based statements. Many student responses also included extra details, showing not just memorization of information but also understanding. For the question


‘What are the environmental problems in Maio?’, after the intervention many students listed the five threats mentioned in the activity: quad bikes, illegal sand extraction, too many people, litter and hotel construction; however, some stu- dents reinforced their answers with additional details, such as ‘quad bikes making water and sand dirty’ and ‘quad bikes destroying bird nests’. Some students included threats that were not mentioned in the activity, such as ‘people killing animals’, ‘driving cars through protected areas’ and ‘turtle poaching’. These extra details suggest that students were able not only to learn the information that was being taught but also to apply their knowledge to the question after the activity. These results suggest this type of classroom environmen-


tal education is most powerful when targeted towards teaching information and knowledge retention, even if this may not necessarily spark interest or change opinions. These evaluation results can then be used to plan environ- mental education that specifically aims to improve learning. However, as we conducted the follow-up questionnaires only 1 week after the intervention, we do not know for how long thereafter the students retained the learning. Future studies could potentially include follow-up over a longer time period. Our fourth finding was that although Intervention was


the most influential variable overall, the school that a stu- dent attended also affected the responses to some state- ments. There did not seem to be a trend to this, and these School effects were particular to the question. Overall, students from the school Morro gave higher scores for five of the nine questions affected by School, but these were spread over the topics of all five groups of questions, making it difficult to draw any conclusions regarding the effect of School. Morro had a class size of only seven students, and some studies suggest that smaller class sizes facilitate im- proved learning (Altinok & Kingdon, 2012; Fogarty, 2012). However, other research suggests that class size alone is not sufficient to affect learning outcomes but that a mixture of socio-economic factors is important (Hattie, 2005;Köhler, 2022). Additionally, the effect of School could relate to the lo- cation of a school rather than the school itself.Morro, for ex- ample, is a small rural village, and the culture of the village, teacher or home life could have been influential factors.More research is required to determine the specific effect of the in- dividual school on environmental attitudes and knowledge. In summary, this study has shown that evaluation is cru-


cial to understanding the impacts that educational activities have on student knowledge, environmental attitudes and aspirations. This one-time classroom activity successfully increased student knowledge of local environmental issues and raised awareness of solutions to these problems. However, the activity was not effective in improving envir- onmental attitudes. Although this study was small and simple, the results suggest that environmental education is


Oryx, 2024, 58(2), 210–217 © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605323000303


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