Measuring environmental education program impacts and learning in the field: Using an action research cycle to develop a tool for use with young students

Despite the increasing importance of, and interest in, documenting the impact of environmental education programs on students' learning for sustainability, few tools are currently available to measure young students' environmental learning across all the dimensions of knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours. This paper reports on the development of such a tool, using an iterative action research process with 134 students, aged six to eleven, attending programs at an Environmental Education Centre in Queensland. The resulting instrument, the Environmental Learning Outcomes Survey (ELOS) incorporates observations of students' engagement in learning processes as well as measuring learning outcomes, and allows both of these aspects to be linked to particular components of the environmental education program. Test data using the instrument are reported to illustrate its potential usefulness. It is envisaged that the refined instrument will enable researchers to measure student environmental learning in the field, investigate environmental education program impacts and identify aspects of programs that are most effective in facilitating student learning. [Author abstract]

Choosing to have children or choosing to be childfree: Australian students' attitudes towards the decisions of heterosexual and lesbian women

Research has demonstrated that voluntarily childless heterosexual women, and lesbian women choosing to become mothers, are negatively stereotyped. However, there is little recent Australian research, and attitudes may have changed in line with changing family formation patterns. This study assessed young Australians' attitudes towards either a lesbian or a heterosexual woman who was planning, or not planning, to have children. One hundred and nineteen first year psychology students, and members of the general public, participated. The majority of participants were under 20, female, European Australian and single. Participants read a brief description of a woman who was variously described as having a male or a female partner, and as planning or not planning to have children. As expected, participants rated the heterosexual woman more favourably than the lesbian, and the woman wanting children more positively than the woman not wanting children. However, there was a trend for the lesbian woman planning to have children to be rated as happier, more mature and more individualistic than others. The legal and social implications associated with wanting to be a lesbian mother in Australia make motherhood a more difficult process for lesbian women than it does for heterosexual women, and may explain why lesbian women who have decided to take this difficult path are seen as happier and more mature, than women making more conventional life choices. While the predominantly young, female student sample limits the generality of the findings, they suggest that social attitudes towards female sexual orientation and women's childbirth decisions are changing.

Acculturation and eating disorders in Asian and Caucasian Australian university students

This study aimed to compare the attitudes and psychopathology of eating disorders of Asian and Caucasian university students using a survey method. The study also investigated the relationship between acculturation, attitudes and psychopathology of eating disorders in sub-groups of Asian girls. There were 130 Asian and 110 Caucasian adolescent girls, aged 18–24 who were screened using the Eating Attitudes Test (EAT-26), the Eating Disorders Inventory (EDI-2) and an Acculturation Index. The Asian group did not have higher mean EAT score than the Caucasian group, but had higher mean score in some sub-scales of the EDI-2. Eating disordered attitudes and psychopathology was not significantly different in the low compared to the high accultured Asian girls. This study suggests that Asian and Caucasian university students in Western Australia are equally susceptible to eating disorders, and that the level of acculturation does not modify the susceptibility of Asian students for eating disorders.