The major challenges of today’s society, such as climate change, water and food security, as well as biodiversity loss, involve efforts to protect and save the environment. Coping with these ‘wicked’ problems requires education and engagement [
1]. As a result, environmental education and education for sustainable development become increasingly important [
2]. Considering only the formal education sector, environmental education, however, still struggles for curriculum time embedded primarily in science or biology classes [
3]. Historically, environmental education entered school curricula in the 1970s when concerns about environmental degradation were broadly discussed on a global level [
4]. The explicit goals and objectives of environmental education were described in documents such as the Belgrade Charter [
5] and the Tbilisi Declaration [
6]. The latter had remarked that education was a major trigger for utilizing the findings of science and technology and asked for it to have a leading role in creating an awareness and a better understanding of environmental problems, thus anchoring environmental education within science education. Over 40 years later, both environmental education and science education have evolved considerably. While science education primarily builds upon acquiring knowledge and teaching skills, environmental education, within a formal and informal context, focuses additionally on raising awareness and even on changing behavior, often in a more emotional context [
2]. Nevertheless, authors such as Gough [
4] have already questioned science education as an appropriate host for environmental education, as their relationship can be characterized as ‘distant, competitive, predatory‒prey, and host‒parasite’ (p. 1203). Some science educators have even claimed an incompatibility between both sets, as the objective and rational character of science education cannot engage social issues as necessary within a holistic sense of environmental education. Instead of accepting these traditional orientations, Gough [
4] appealed to both science and environmental educators to consider their educational goals not as static and monumental. Environmental education could rather function as enrichment for science education by introducing values and action in the sense of scientific literacy. Young people would be concerned about current environmental challenges, which might be pivotal in rekindling their interest in the relevance of science. Therefore, Wals and colleagues [
2] indicated the potential of citizen science and ICT tools as upcoming trends that can be used to foster the needed convergence between science and environmental education—a convergence that is increasingly demanded in the face of the previously mentioned wicked challenges [
1]. Due to the discrepancy that still exists between science education and environmental education, a closer look at students’ personal views is needed to ascertain what extent the individual motivation to learn science might relate to environmental attitudes and values.
1.1. Science Motivation
Students’ interest, motivation, and attitudes toward science were repeatedly investigated in educational research studies [
7,
8]. In general, the relationship between students and school science and technology is described as problematic, pointing to a decline of motivation, attitudes, and interest, especially linked with age and gender (in favor of boys). Especially, motivation to learn science is regarded as an interfering factor in the process of becoming a scientifically literate citizen [
9]. Following the social cognitive theory of human learning described by Bandura [
10], Glynn et al. [
9] refined the traditional definition of motivation—motivation to learn science is ‘an internal state that arouses, directs, and sustains science-learning behavior’ (p. 1160). A motivated person ‘is moved to do something’ [
11] (p. 54), which means in our context—moved to learn science. Motivation is not directly observable, but derivable from observed behavior or (self-) reports [
12]. Besides people’s level or amount of motivation, people vary in their orientation of motivation which ‘concerns the underlying attitudes and goals that give rise to action’ [
11] (p. 54). Basically, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation need differentiation. Intrinsic motivation is defined as doing an activity (e.g., learning) for its inherent satisfaction, the enjoyment of the activity itself. Extrinsic motivation, in contrast, refers to doing something in order to attain some tangible outcomes, such as better career options or a good grade [
11]. However, motivation as a multicomponent construct consists of many factors. One crucial attribute in the learning context is the self-determination referring to students’ perception of their control of learning. A positive feeling of autonomy can come along with intrinsic motivation supporting academic performance [
13]. Equally, self-efficacy plays an important role, which refers to the individual confidence in the ability to achieve desired results [
10]. Similar to self-determination, self-efficacy is supposed to facilitate intrinsic motivation [
11] and strongly predicts academic achievement [
14].
Within the social cognitive learning theory, self-regulation is regarded as a crucial precondition for desired learning outcomes. As self-regulation can arise when students understand and control their motivation, cognition, and behavior, teachers and instructors should create learning environments in which behavior such as asking questions, studying, or help seeking is provoked [
12]. The understanding of students’ motivation toward science and related individual factors forms the basis for the creation of goal-oriented self-regulated learning environments in science education. This requires reliable and valid tools to assess motivation. Besides further instruments to quantify students’ motivation toward science (for an overview, see [
15]), the Science Motivation Questionnaire in its current version (SMQ-II) [
9] captures a student’s motivation as a multicomponent construct. The SMQ-II builds upon the social cognitive theory [
10] as well as the self-determination theory [
16] by combining internal and external motivational factors. The internal sub-factors include the inherent satisfaction of learning sciences (intrinsic motivation), the perceived competence in completing science-related tasks (self-efficacy) and the perceived autonomy referring to students’ commitment and effort (self-determination). The external factors cover two dimensions of the motivation to learn science—learning because of the expectation of external compensation in the form of good grades (grade motivation) and learning because of the judgment of science as valuable for future career options (career motivation) [
13]. Although the scale was originally developed to monitor motivation at university level, the suitability for (upper) secondary school level was also proven [
17,
18].
Motivation toward science is regarded as a key element in science education and in acquiring scientific literacy [
9]. Empirical studies have already proved the link between science motivation and academic performance [
19,
20,
21]. While motivation toward science may affect learning processes, single factors of motivation in this context are related to individual characteristics such as personality traits [
17], cognitive style [
22], and interest [
23], to name but a few. Potvin and Hasni [
8] discussed these links in their review work in depth.
1.2. Environmental Attitudes
Pillars of educational initiatives within the environmental context are knowledge, attitudes, skills, and awareness, which form a person’s environmental competence [
5]. Since the anchoring of environmental issues in formal education, many research studies have dedicated their focus to the influences and interrelations between these elements with the overall aim of encouraging more pro-environmental behavior [
24]. Strong predictors for conservational performance seem to be environmental attitudes [
25] and connectedness to nature [
26]. The effectiveness of educational methods and approaches in the environmental context is well documented (for an overview see [
27]). In this regard, environmental knowledge [
28,
29] can be acquired through educational settings that focus on intervening with positive environmental attitudes [
30,
31]. Although most of the investigated settings were settled in conventional classroom contexts [
29] or residential outreach programs [
32], to our knowledge there are no studies on the function of environmental attitudes in science classes.
For measuring adolescents’ environmental attitude sets, the Two Major Environmental Value model (2-MEV) [
33,
34] is proved to be a valid and reliable tool and was applied in many research studies in the environmental context [
29,
31]. The model assesses the two orthogonal factors, preservation and utilization—the first refers to a person’s intent to support nature, his or her care with resources as well as the inherent enjoyment of nature, and the latter covers a person’s perspective on human dominance and altering nature [
34]. Subsequent studies revealed that the utilization of nature had been considered as the exploitative usage of nature, whereas the appreciative usage of nature had been widely neglected. The two perspectives of utilization constitute two ends of a spectrum or are even opposites of each other [
35]. Therefore, Bogner [
36] extended the 2-MEV model by adding the dimension, appreciation, from an existing scale from Brügger and colleagues [
37]. With the help of an exploratory factor analysis, it was shown that appreciation constituted a distinguishable factor, which was related to preservation, but not to utilization—a person who appreciates nature tends to have a preservative attitude and vice versa [
36]. Further studies using the 2-MEV in an educational context revealed that positive environmental attitude sets relate to learners’ knowledge acquisition [
29,
32] as well as to other individuals’ characteristics [
38].
1.3. Purpose
Motivation to learn science is a key element regarding a successful acquisition of scientific knowledge and literacy as well as regarding future career choices. Unfortunately, secondary school students, especially girls, show declining science motivation. On the other hand, environmental attitudes play a crucial role in environmental education, as positive values are a precondition for pro-environmental behavior. Environmental education approaches especially aim to foster positive attitudes and awareness toward nature.
The main purpose of our current study is therefore to analyze a potential relation between the motivation to learn science and environmental values in the context of possible synergies of science and environmental education. Thus, the objectives are threefold—first, to apply and confirm existing scales to monitor science motivation and environmental values with the focus on a secondary school sample; second, to analyze the relationship of both scale constructs; and third, to unveil potential gender differences.