An Analysis of the Sustainable Development of Environmental Education Provided by Museums

Abstract

Under the international initiative of environmental education and ecological conservation, promoting the public’s environmental awareness is the mission and goal of the museum’s environmental education. The main function of the museum is to integrate the values of local, regional, and national culture toward multifaceted management, as the museum is an important cultural carrier and a key force for informal education. Past studies have focused on environmental protection in formal educational settings, while museums in nonformal educational settings have undertaken relatively few missions to the environment, which is the motivation of this study. In the past three hundred years, nine countries, including world powers like Spain, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Japan, have left their footprints in Tamsui, Taiwan, creating an important field for cross-cultural environmental education. Therefore, this study takes environmental education in the protection of Taiwan’s Tamsui cultural assets as its case study, and uses gradual regression analysis as a method to explore the potential factors of audience cognition resulting from the channels of museum environmental education, and to grasp the possibility of implementation. The results show that the reliability coefficient of this study is 0.908, and the internal consistency of the representative scale is high. The overall satisfaction with environmental education of audiences is above 4.24 in the five-level subscale. Further gradual regression analysis shows that positive and negative explanatory power can be used to examine the environmental education programs of museums. Therefore, according to data analysis, the findings can serve as a basis for promoting social environmental education goals, as well as a field for cross-cultural learning, to achieve a people-oriented sustainable development strategy.