P4.035: Educating Children About Environmental Impacts on Human Health: Analysis of a Community Level Intervention

Background: The impact of the environment on human health is an important consideration for public health, and research shows that education fosters environmental awareness in students at an early age1. To promote this in elementary schools, our team developed Raising Environmental Awareness for Community Health (REACH), a program for 4th and 5th graders in Title 1 community schools. Through hands-on experiments and interactive lessons on the environment, REACH aims to enhance environmental literacy. This research study evaluates the impact of a community outreach educational initiative on participants’ self-perceived awareness of environmental science.

Project Description: REACH was held as a five-week after-school program for 4th and 5th graders at two public elementary schools predominantly serving students from backgrounds underrepresented in STEM. REACH has five interactive lessons on biodiversity, energy sources, pollution, and renewable energy. The final session is a comprehensive review, including a brainstorming session for actionable ways students can advocate for the environment in the future. A post-pre survey was administered upon program completion to assess participants’ environmental awareness and self-efficacy using a 1–10 Likert scale2. The data was analyzed using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test.

Discussion: Over the five-week program, overall attendance averaged 71.68%, with 9.6 students per session at one school and 6.6 at the other. Student perceptions showed significant positive shifts (Figure 1): average ratings for the importance of biodiversity on health increased from 5.0 to 9.5 (p = 0.001), renewable energy from 6.1 to 9.4 (p = 0.008), and pollution from 4.9 to 9.7 (p < 0.001). Additionally, students reported a greater likelihood of sharing information about climate change, with ratings rising from 5.5 to 9.0 (p < 0.001), while the rating for how likely students were to get involved in efforts to protect the planet increased from 5.7 to 9.9 (p = 0.002).

Conclusion: Following the completion of the 5-week REACH program, participants demonstrated a heightened sense of importance regarding various environmental science topics. This demonstrates that REACH holds promise as a successful initiative to increase environmental awareness, particularly amongst underrepresented populations in STEM. As an afterschool program, REACH can help bridge gaps in environmental science education in communities where science topics are cut to meet state education requirements. Future work of the program will involve implementing the curriculum in other schools within the community to observe if similar trends are present and to expand and diversify the sample population.