Project-Based Learning: An Approach to Promote Energy Literacy Among Secondary School Students

Abstract

Globalization, rapid industrial development, and tremendous population growth have significantly increased the demand for energy. Sustaining the energy supply requires that society be energy literate. Existing studies on secondary school students' energy literacy suggest that effective teaching approaches can enhance energy literacy. This quasi-experimental study was designed to test the null hypotheses that project-based energy learning does not enhance knowledge, attitudes, behavior, and beliefs related to energy. For this purpose, two classes from a school were assigned to experimental and control groups. Following the intervention, an ANCOVA analysis with the pretest results as the covariate showed statistically significant differences in the four aspects that were researched. Additionally, interviews with randomly selected students from the experimental and control groups further support the findings. Implications of the findings are discussed.

Revisiting Education for Sustainable Development: Methods to Inspire Secondary School Students toward Renewable Energy

“…However, simply introducing the curricula would be insufficient if the teaching and learning approaches fail to explore active learning involving the community, home, and technological factors. The curricula must also feature multidisciplinary concepts [40,41] that integrate all the mentioned factors before introducing the curricula into the secondary education spectrum.…”

“…The educational strategies employed were active, interactive, game-based, project-based, experiential, action-based, collaborative, problembased, and multidisciplinary learning strategies (Table 3). The results indicated that the introduction of such content on RE and sustainable development concepts increased the overall interests of the students in RE concepts and STEM subjects, motivated them to learn more about the environmental issues and how to address them, increased their knowledge about RE concepts, and increased their awareness about the necessity of environmental safety and the different strategies for harnessing green and clean environmentally benign energy [20,27,28,30,36,[39][40][41][42][43].…”

“…Table 4 reveals that five articles among the selected ones directly highlighted the increase in the awareness of RE and SDG among the students when RE concepts and ESD were introduced into the secondary level of education [24,25,33,36,40]. Furthermore, five research works directly highlighted the increase in the students' motivation toward RE and SDGs [20,28,31,40,41]. Three of the articles highlighted the students' increased interest [20,23,27], and seven directly highlighted the increase in the students' knowledge about RE and sustainable development [26,30,32,34,[39][40][41].…”

Developing Low Carbon Schools Model through Students Involvement in Sustainability Activities

“…Through the implementation of the Low Carbon School initiative, the school community will be able to adopt a lifestyle that using renewable energy alternatives, involves less dependence on fossil fuels, and adopts "3R" practices of Reuse, Reduce and Recycle. In fact, through this programme, students' literacy can be enhanced through the foundation of this energy-literate education and low carbon practice (Mageswary et al, 2015). A study by John et al (2016) at primary schools around New South Wales, Australia showed that the implementation of the Climate Clever Energy Savers (CCES) programme was effective in helping students to identify ways to reduce electricity consumption and improve their literacy knowledge.…”

“…However, the positive knowledge of students about environmental care is also influenced by family practices, teachers, media, reading practice, and the school curriculum's environmental content (Zarrintaj et al, 2013). In addition, effective teaching approaches can also help to improve the students' levels of environmental energy literacy (Mageswary et al, 2016). The theory of student involvement, developed from Vygotsky (1978) emphasises the role of the environment in students' learning process by encouraging their involvement through the introduction of effective pedagogical practices in the learning process ( Figure 1).…”