Youth Education
Dr. Martinez
CODE 122
9 March 2025
Teachers’ Perspectives on Water Conservation Education
Our survey is mainly for teachers and educators. It was created to learn how educators feel about water conservation in the classroom, giving us a more open understanding of difficulties and challenges regarding water conservation and its importance in the education system. It is meant to educate the youth and upcoming generations on water quality and infrastructure because if the children are educated on these issues and resonate with them, they can ensure a better future.
Our survey has 9 questions and consisted of multiple-choice questions, open ended questions, and “select all that apply”. A question we asked was regarding the age group of kids that educators interact with. This would help us better analyze trends according to the demographics provided. In addition, another question we asked in our survey was regarding water topics.
We received 196 total responses. The majority of our responses came from those who interacted with sixth through eighth grade students. These educators think labs and experiments work best for engaging students. Data is evenly divided when asked if they’ve used interactive activities in the classroom, but the smallest proportions of responses said they were extremely familiar or not at all familiar with these conservation education practices.
For those who answered “no”, we inquired about the barriers that prevented them from these activities. This data was spread evenly as well, but as you can see below, it seems like most teachers need money, materials, and are unaware of the urgency of this issue. Talking to legislators about this during System Day will be beneficial.
We asked if respondents were comfortable sharing where they get their lesson plans from. Most of the respondents said they got their lesson plans online or from textbooks, which will be helpful when we work on Lab #2. Here are a few resources we could use:
Common threads among success stories involve personal stories from students that led them to learn more emotionally. Other stories consist of high school students doing volunteer work with local nonprofits. Below are a few success stories we found particularly interesting.
The suggestions portion at the end of the survey was helpful so we have outside perspectives on what they find important. We have been working nonstop on this project for over 6 months now, and we could use the outside opinions on things we may be oblivious to. Examples of their suggestions included documenting water usage in their homes, going on field trips, and incorporating hands-on activities.
The overall design of this survey was concise and to the point. Our use of open-ended and closed-ended questions to receive information from educators benefited our results. One way we can improve this survey is by honing in on our subjects, specifically STEM educators and any other science programs. By doing this information collected will be more exact and targeted to what we are doing in the future with JJK. In addition to improving this survey we can focus on getting a more diverse range of data over multiple student age ranges since most of our data came from school educators.