Environmental education has become an important topic on the agenda at many German public schools. Many believe that they share in the education process on environmental issues and relevant behavior through a positive example. Students experience the esteemed environmental standards as they are reflected in the physical design and layout of the school, or in the day to day general practices and routines there, or both. Student participation is sometimes an important contributing factor in the decision making process concerning environment and their school as well as in the resulting environmental measures and activities taken up there.

What schools do for their environment - how the school looks and how the school functions - environmentally - characterizes its "ecological culture". The present investigation has attempted to address the following hypotheses:

1. A school with marked "ecological culture" has identifiable structural cues; and
2. the "ecological culture" is reflected in its students in terms of the acquisition of environmentally relevant knowledge, activity at school and motivation.

The first three chapters give a general background on the institutionalization of environmental education in the German public schools and outline the theory supporting the argument under investigation.

Chapter 4 reports on previous research leading to the study. In particular, it introduces an integrated model for environmental behavior. This model describes theoretically the 3 cognitive phases an individual goes through when making a conscious decision to act environmentally. The phase components make up the dependent variables and are used to identify student profiles on environmental motivation through latent class analysis. Additional data was collected on student environmental activity at school and on student knowledge of nature and environmental conservation going on there, too.

The independent variables on "ecological culture" at school and the instruments especially developed to collect data on them is the subject of the beginning of Chapter 5. A model is then proposed which describes typical ecological cultures expected to be found at schools and their impact on students. The instruments used were 1) a survey assessment of the physical "landscape" of the school and 2) an interview with the school principal on general environmental practices there.

The results in the latter part of the chapter describe the findings. Items from both the survey and the interview were constructed to facilitate ordinal response categories. Schools could be compared with one another and ranked according to responses to individual variables, their ecological design or practices on the whole and their overall prevailing ecological culture. Their effects - relative to one another - on students could be compared. In this way, several ecological cultures could be identified and typified; and their effects on student motivation, activity and knowledge in the area "environment" could be measured and characterized.

Chapter 6 reflects on the research methods used here for future use and on implications these results have for environmental education within the German public school system and for education in general.