Learning about Drinking Water: How Important are the Three Dimensions of Knowledge that Can Change Individual Behavior?

Clean drinking water, our most important resource, needs comprehensive protection. Due to its ubiquitous availability, the awareness of the importance of clean drinking water has partially vanished. Therefore, sensitizing within this context and improving individual ecological behavior has become an important issue in science curricula. We developed a student-centered guided-learning module based on nine workstations, with the themes: occurrence rates, purification methods, cleaning guidelines, distribution patterns, use and consumption, pollution, problems, types of drinking water and virtual water. One hundred and seventy four ninth to eleventh graders participated in our outreach intervention. All tasks presented via workstations were completed before participants inspected a nearby reed sewage treatment plant and completed hands-on experiments. For empirical analyses, we collected the newly acquired knowledge in three dimensions: system-knowledge, action-related knowledge and effectiveness knowledge, which together are assumed to provide a sufficient basis for conservation behavior. System knowledge directly affects action-related and effectiveness knowledge and these two types of knowledge, in turn, affect directly the ecological behavior. At all three test schedules, the three dimensions of knowledge correlated with each other, especially in both follow-up tests. The relevance of these results for schools is discussed