| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺中教育大學 === 環境教育研究所 === 95 === The purpose of this research was to evaluate the impact on the environmental knowledge, environmental attitudes, and attitudes toward senior adults held by young participants of an intergenerational environmental education program. The research audiences were the participants of the “Young Explorers—Endemic Species Camp” which was ran on January 21 and 22, 2006 in the Endemic Species Research Institute in Nantou County, Taiwan. A “pretest-posttest control group” true-experimental design was chosen to compare the experimental groups (43 4th-6th graders taught by four senior volunteers) with the control groups (43 4th-6th graders taught by four young adult volunteers) in the program. A triangulation research approach that utilized both quantitative and qualitative (e.g., senior volunteer interview, staff interview, student test, field observation, student feedback sheet) data sources were applied.
According to the quantitative data, the intergenerational groups did not obtain significant higher mean scores for environmental knowledge and attitudes than the monogenerational groups. There were three possible reasons. First, Type II error might occur due to insufficient number of samples. Second, the focus of the test was only general endemic species theme. The items of the questionnaire couldn’t investigate what old people teach. Third, the control group students also had chances to interact with senior volunteers during meal and night party time, thus the differences between groups were not significant. However, the qualitative data showed that senor adults have certain characteristics that allowed them to make a substantial contribution. Older adults tend to use folk stories and life experiences to enrich teaching content. They would also utilize stories and traditional songs to stimulate learning interests. Additionally, the senior volunteers treat the participated students as their own grandchildren, and their behavior became the model of the children. The results indicated that an intergenerational engagement experience was helpful to improve children’s opinions toward elderly.
The nature center staffs noticed the specialty of older volunteers. However, they remained wait-and-see toward the implementation of intergenerational programs in the future since they didn’t have enough experiences. Therefore, more research studies and program practices are needed in order to prove the effectiveness of an intergenerational approach in outdoor environmental education.
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