Redefining Homework: Are the Green Schools Program Students Taking Energy Efficiency Home with Them?

Doug Bruchs and Michelle Levy, Quantec, LLC
Swarupa Ganguli, Alliance to Save Energy

Keywords

Abstract

To explore the impact of the Alliance to Save Energy’s (ASE) Green Schools Program (GSP) outside the classroom, Quantec conducted in-depth, in-home interviews with the families
of ten participating students. The family interviews were designed to gather data regarding the Program’s impact on students’ at-home energy practices, as well to determine whether the student shared information learned during their experience in the Program with parents, siblings and/or friends. Due to difficulties in soliciting families to volunteer, only a small sample of families with participating students were interviewed. As a result, the following assessment of responses should be viewed as a case study of the experiences of these ten students (and nine families), rather than as a representation of the Program’s impacts overall. While the limited sample size prohibits a statistically significant analysis of the findings, the in-depth, in-home interviewing methodology was highly adaptable and led to findings of greater quality and depth by overcoming several traditional barriers to data acquisition. Generally, the results of this exploration indicate that participating students adopted behavioral changes both at school and at home, and shared information learned through the GSP with their families. To a lesser extent, parents and siblings also indicated that they made energy efficiency changes as a result of their child/sibling’s participation in the GSP. In addition, they verified that they had observed the behavioral changes purported by the participating student.