The goal of this project was to test the ecological literacy of the Carleton College campus, in an effort to propose recommendations that increase the environmental educational opportunities on campus. These recommendations included: a graduation requirement of environmental education (ENTS requirement), an ENTS component in first year seminar classes, and more extensive advertisement of the ENTS department and its classes on campus.

Our methods included surveying a random selection of the freshman and senior classes and comparing their attitudes, actions, and knowledge dealing with environmental issues. Then we compared our results to those at Penn State University, Mount Holyoke College, and Tulane University, institutions that performed similar studies of their student bodies.

For our purposes with this survey, we defined an “ecologically literate” person as someone who possesses the following characteristics: a high degree of environmental knowledge, a positive attitude towards the environment, and behaviors or actions that reflect their knowledge and attitudes.

Our goal was to assess knowledge of both local and global environmental issues on a very broad scale. Therefore, we would like to emphasize that our test of “ecological knowledge” is defined by the questions we chose to include in our survey.

Because our survey was voluntary (we distributed 200 surveys of which 54 were returned), we should mention that our data might be skewed towards those with greater interest in the environment. Our assumption is that those with greater interest in environmental issues were more likely to return the surveys. Therefore, what started as a random sampling of students may not be as random as expected.