Environmental Literacy Questions

MEEA developed a question bank to test environmental literacy on ten topics for 4 different grade bands: lower elementary, upper elementary, middle school and high school. Questions for younger students cover concrete things they encounter in their everyday lives in simple direct language. Older students are introduced to more complex and abstract concepts in line with the subjects they are learning in school. Each topic area has 30 or more questions for each grade band. We’ve formatted these questions to be used as printable quizzes, online quizzes, or even as a board game.

About the Question Sets

The goal of generating the 1200+ questions in this set was to identify the scope and depth of environmental knowledge that students should know at the end of each major period of schooling. In the end, it is an attempt to define what an educated citizen should know about the environment.

The first ten topics were selected from the major topic areas of the Missouri Environmental Literacy Standards. Reviews of the Next Generation Science Standards, Common Core Math and ELA Standards and national Social Studies standards, along with surveys of children’s non-fiction literature, school worksheets and topical websites helped determine the particular sub-topics and math and reading skills for each grade band.

The questions were written by Jan Weaver, former Executive Director of MEEA, and formerly Director of Environmental Studies and Associate Director of the Honors College Science Sequence for the University of Missouri-Columbia.

The work was supported by an EPA Environmental Education Grant. However, MEEA, and Jan Weaver specifically, assumes all responsibility for any errors in the questions, whether factual, grammatical or spelling.

How to Use the Questions

Any way you like! But please provide attribution and/or a link where appropriate so other folks can have a chance to use the questions themselves.

Suggestions

  1. use as pre-tests to find out what your students or audience already know about a topic
  2. use as pre- and post-tests to assess learning after a lesson, field trip, lab or other activity
  3. use them to design a lesson, activity or worksheet, by taking the answers as your target for the lesson plan
  4. use them to assess your own knowledge of a topic and to identify strengths and weaknesses in your understanding
  5. use them as a game (see Earth Quest)
  6. search for errors to help make this a better question set
  7. use them as a template for creating your own questions by adding to a topic or starting a new topic

Section Details and Instructions

The spreadsheets include columns for number, question, correct answer and two or three distractors. There are also columns for the main topic and subtopics and occasionally, explanations for the answer or links to additional sources of information.

Each document contains all the questions for a particular topic and grade band. The correct answer is always A. We provided documents instead of pdfs so that users could pick and choose their own questions, reorder the questions and answers, and edit or add questions as they wish to suit their own purposes.

Early elementary quizzes have 5 randomly selected questions. Quizzes for older students have 10 randomly selected questions. At the end you will get your score and see the correct answers. Quizzes can be repeated, but questions and answers are shuffled with each quiz.

We do not have the capacity to return test results to individuals, classes or schools. If you want to keep test results for any reason, be sure and record scores and/or print out the score sheet.

Kindergarten - 2 (Early Elementary)
Topic Assesments Board Game
1. Air Pollution Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
2. Biodiversity & Habitat Loss Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
3. Climate Change Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
4. Critical Resources Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
5. Energy Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
6. Human Health Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
7. Matter Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
8. Tech, Tools, Skills Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
9. Waste Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
10. Water Pollution Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
3 - 5 (Upper Elementary)
Topic Assesments Board Game
1. Air Pollution Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
2. Biodiversity & Habitat Loss Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
3. Climate Change Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
4. Critical Resources Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
5. Energy Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
6. Human Health Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
7. Matter Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
8. Tech, Tools, Skills Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
9. Waste Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
10. Water Pollution Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
6 - 8 (Middle School)
Topic Assesments Board Game
1. Air Pollution Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
2. Biodiversity & Habitat Loss Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
3. Climate Change Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
4. Critical Resources Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
5. Energy Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
6. Human Health Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
7. Matter Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
8. Tech, Tools, Skills Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
9. Waste Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
10. Water Pollution Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
9 - 12 (High School)
Topic Assesments Board Game
1. Air Pollution Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
2. Biodiversity & Habitat Loss Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
3. Climate Change Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
4. Critical Resources Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
5. Energy Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
6. Human Health Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
7. Matter Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
8. Tech, Tools, Skills Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
9. Waste Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging
10. Water Pollution Document Excel Online quiz Easy Challenging

Errors

We welcome feedback about the questions, their age appropriateness, correctness, even spelling and grammar! Please share any thoughts, comments, or corrections you have with me at weaverjc@missouri.edu.

Things to keep in mind!

1. Some audiences may be too young for qualifying statements. For example, in the K-2 questions we made an effort to keep questions and answers to one syllable words and sentences to less than ten words. This means there was quite a bit of generalizing. If you can improve accuracy without sacrificing brevity, suggestions are welcome!

2. The issues the questions are based on are a moving target. New knowledge from research or changing environmental conditions may make some questions out of date. We will try to review the questions every year or so, but updates are welcome!

EarthQuest (Board Game)

Quizzes are a great assessment tool, but learning and recalling knowledge in a fun environment can make the topic more interesting for kids. We wanted there to be another way for students to interact with the assessment questions, so we created a board game. We have three sets of cards for this game, some grade levels have overlapping sets so that there can be an easier and a more challenging set of game play.

Game Board

Print out the gameboard – 4 sheets- and then tape them together as shown.
Be sure and leave a little space between the sheets so it is easy to fold the board together.

Sections

Merged

Instructions

Missouri Lake