Environmental Education Materials: Guidelines for Excellence.

Overview & Synopsis

These guidelines are a set of recommendations for developing and selecting environmental education materials with the aim of helping developers of activity guides, lesson plans, and other instructional materials produce high quality products and providing educators with a tool to evaluate the wide array of available education materials. They offer a way to judge the relative merit of different materials, a standard to aim for in developing new materials, and a set of ideas about what a well-rounded environmental education curriculum might be like. The guidelines point out six key characteristics of high quality environmental education materials, including fairness and accuracy, depth, emphasis on skill building, action orientation, instructional soundness, and usability. For each of these characteristics there are listed some guidelines for environmental education materials to follow. Each guideline is accompanied by several indicators listed under the heading "What to Look For". These indicators suggest ways of gauging whether the materials being evaluated or developed follow the guidelines. (JRH)