The impact of zoo education programmes on connection to nature considering programme type, participants' demographics and their initial connection

Participants in environmental education programmes can have different preexisting attitudes and experiences that could influence the educational outcomes. The present study focuses on zoo education and its goal of connecting people to nature. It analyses the effect of educational programmes on participants' connection to nature, considering their preexisting (initial) connection to nature. Twenty zoos collected data from programme participants using questionnaires before and after their programmes. Using the Illustrated Inclusion of Nature in Self scale, participants were categorized as low, medium and high connected to nature. The evaluation data was then analysed based on the demographics of the participants (age, gender, zoo visit frequency) and the programme components (programme duration, animal contact, topic of conservation). The results indicated that the programmes had a stronger effect on connection to nature among low‐ and medium‐connected participants than among those with high initial connection to nature. Further, the influence of demographic characteristics and programme components was more pronounced for low‐ and medium‐connected participants. Low‐ and medium‐connected participants showed greater increases when they directly encountered animals, heard about conservation or participated in long programmes. Gender played a role insofar as women with a low connection to nature experienced a stronger increase in their connection to nature than low‐connected men. Infrequent zoo visitors benefited less from educational programmes. In contrast, these factors had little effect on the outcomes for participants who had a high connection to nature from the beginning. Since the initial values correlated with the extent to which people's connection to nature changed, we recommend keeping them in mind when conducting research or evaluations. This applies not only to people's connection to nature; initial values in general could help explain results that practitioners and researchers might encounter. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.