What Influences the Environmental Actions of College Students in Mainland China? Environmental Literacy as An Analytical Framework

Abstract

As an important index for assessing the effect of environmental education, environmental literacy has become the value consensus of various countries for implementing environmental education. The level of environmental literacy and main factors influencing environmental action are always the main focus of research performed in the field of environmental education. In this work, the current environmental literacy of college students in mainland China is discussed and analyzed. The analysis is based on the predictive degrees of three groups of environmental literacy variables (knowledge, awareness, and skill) related to environmental action. A questionnaire survey was carried out involving college students in Shanghai Municipality, Anhui Province, and Guangxi Province. Students majoring in three subjects were sampled from these areas that have different levels of economic development, yielding a total of 1,890 valid samples. Our descriptive statistical and hierarchical regression analyses reveal that: (1) College students in mainland China are not environmentally active enough, only performing well in ecologically civilized behavior. However, while they do at times exhibit persuasion-induced behavior that influences others, they hardly take any civil actions that benefit other citizens and society as a whole. (2) The college students have a medium-sized level of environmental literacy. Among the three groups of variables (knowledge, awareness, and skill), they perform well in terms of awareness. (3) If the three groups of variables are used synchronously, then they can account for up to 44.8% of the students’ environmental actions, at most. Our results show that environmental desire, behavioral intent, and civic participation skills are the important factors for predicting environmental action. Based on this, the research results can be used to provide important suggestions for improving the environmental education of college students.