ArticleDevelopmental science2026
Using Motive-Alignment to Enhance Environmental Education for Youth: A Participatory Field Experiment.
Article in Developmental science, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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5 authors.
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Abstract
We conducted a pre-registered longitudinal field experiment to test whether educational activities inspired by sustainability motive-alignment theory can boost the effectiveness of real-world environmental education. Motive-alignment interventions aim to encourage behavior change by linking new behaviors with goals that are salient to a target group (e.g., for youth, experiencing autonomy, gaining peer status, or contributing to society). First, we used participatory methods to develop two motive-alignment inspired (MA-inspired) environmental education activities with youth. We then randomly assigned 31 classes of vocational school students to receive a lesson including the MA-inspired activities or an existing lesson about climate change. Ordinal and linear hierarchical Bayesian regression analyses showed that, as hypothesized, the MA-inspired lesson (vs. the original lesson) increased students' involvement in school eco-teams and pro-environmental voting intentions from pre-lesson to post-lesson and two-week follow-up. Exploratory analyses suggested that youth who received the MA-inspired (vs. original) lesson did not feel more motive-alignment during the lesson. However, they did report a heightened sense of environmental efficacy, indicating that the MA-inspired lesson presented pro-environmental engagement as more relevant to youth's motivation for societal contribution. These findings reveal the potential for motive-alignment inspired educational activities-particularly those that tap into youth's motivation for societal contribution-to enhance real-world environmental education. SUMMARY: We co-developed activities with youth, inspired by the principles of sustainability motive-alignment, to integrate into an existing lesson about climate change In a field experiment, the lesson including these activities (vs. the original lesson) increased students' involvement in school eco-teams and pro-environmental voting intentions. Motive-alignment inspired activities that foster environmental efficacy-thus aligning with youth's heightened motivation for contribution-can enhance the impact of environmental education in real-world contexts.
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