Sare Asli 1,2,3,4, Riad Abu-Alhiga 5,6, Shafea Algmal 5 and Muhamad Hugerat 1,2,5,6,*
Abstract: Environmental education is essential in order to curb the current dramatic loss of biodiversity. Students’ commitment to protect local biodiversity is an important goal of education in order to develop and promote sustainable environmental education elsewhere. The main focus of biodiversity education has been to create the knowledge, interest, and skills needed to solve various problems in biodiversity with respect to the local context. This study, which investigated 8th grade students who were taught by the project-based learning (PBL) method, sheds light on the subject of biodiversity (specifically bee extinction); it shows its impact on the classroom climate (CL). This method combines many activities on the subject of bee extinction, such as extracurricular learning and watching videos, in addition to classroom activities where bee extinction is learned experientially; its impact on the CL was investigated. The research tool used was a structured questionnaire (WHIMC; What Happened In My Class); it consisted of 35 questions that examined students’ perceptions of the CL when they learned an entire study unit on bee extinction by the PBL method. The research results indicated that the PBL method, used in studying bee extinction, after performing the activity in all of its dimensions, had a very positive effect on the CL for the experimental group (N = 62), but not among the students in the control group, i.e., the group that continued to study by the traditional teaching method. This was shown, for example, regarding social cohesion (t(57) = 21.85; p < 0.001); students’ perceptions in the experimental group (M = 4.56; SD = 0.32) were more positive than their perceptions in the control group (M = 2.41; SD = 0.42). Keywords: biodiversity education; PBL approach in biodiversity education; classroom climate; sustainability values in biodiversity education
