2005 Volume 15 Issue 1 Pages 15-23
The purpose of this study is to examine whether the Industrial Waste Game (Hirose, et al., 2004), which is effective for college students, can be applied to environmental education at the high school level while comparing it with the video-learning method. First-year high school students were divided into 4 conditioned groups: debriefed after gaming, gaming only, video-learning, and a control group. Students in each group were asked to answer questionnaires for educational evaluation at two times: just after and four months after gaming.
For the evaluation, the questionnaires were made based on three viewpoints: how actively students come to access the industrial waste problem after the activity or learning, how well they understand the cause and effect of the social dilemma, and how much necessity of cooperation for solving the dilemma they feel. The result showed the students in the debriefed after gaming and gaming only groups attained a higher education effect than those in the other two groups.
The analysis indicated that the gaming method is more effective for students to understand the structure of the social dilemma and to attain higher motivation toward tackling environmental issues, and also to maintain longer-term motivation than the video-learning method, which is a type of knowledge offering environmental education.
