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A goal of most environmental education is to motivate students toward environmentally friendly behaviour change. This article describes a study that elucidates how such motivation can be fostered in the classroom. It compared students’ development of environmental motivation in a conventional post-secondary environmental biology course and a similar course guided by self-determination theory (SDT). Students in the SDT-guided course experienced less amotivation after the course than students in the comparison section. This article presents a preliminary empirical examination of the utility of SDT in a formal environmental education setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fostering environmental motivation to perform proenvironmental behaviors is an implicit goal of most environmental education (EE) programs. However, an inadequate amount of research has offered insight into how educators can foster environmental motivation through instruction, and the few studies that address this topic share a single theoretical perspective. The present author explored self-determination theory (SDT) as an alternative research paradigm to fostering environmental motivation in the EE classroom. The author describes SDT's theoretical underpinnings, discusses its potential application to EE, and proposes 3 potentially fruitful avenues of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]