Using motive-alignment to enhance environmental education for youth: A participatory field experiment

Abstract

We conducted a pre-registered longitudinal field experiment to test whether educational activities inspired by sustainability motive-alignment theory can boost the effectiveness of real-world environmental education. Motive-alignment interventions aim to encourage behavior change by linking new behaviors with goals that are salient to a target group (e.g., for youth, experiencing autonomy, gaining peer status, or contributing to society). First, we used participatory methods to develop two motive-alignment inspired (MA-inspired) environmental education activities with youth. We then randomly assigned 31 classes of vocational school students to receive a lesson including the MA-inspired activities or an existing lesson about climate change. Ordinal and linear hierarchical Bayesian regression analyses showed that, as hypothesized, the MA-inspired lesson (vs. the original lesson) increased students’ involvement in school eco-teams and pro-environmental voting intentions from pre-lesson to post-lesson and two-week follow-up. Exploratory analyses suggested that youth who received the MA-inspired (vs. original) lesson did not feel more motive-alignment during the lesson. However, they did report a heightened sense of environmental efficacy, indicating that the MA-inspired lesson presented pro-environmental engagement as more relevant to youth's motivation for societal contribution. These findings reveal the potential for motive-alignment inspired educational activities—particularly those that tap into youth's motivation for societal contribution—to enhance real-world environmental education. Summary: We co-developed activities with youth, inspired by the principles of sustainability motive-alignment, to integrate into an existing lesson about climate change In a field experiment, the lesson including these activities (vs. the original lesson) increased students’ involvement in school eco-teams and pro-environmental voting intentions. Motive-alignment inspired activities that foster environmental efficacy—thus aligning with youth's heightened motivation for contribution—can enhance the impact of environmental education in real-world contexts.