Attitudes and values are considered an important component of learning in higher education, but natural resources and environmental education programs typically emphasize cognitive gains in the design of instructional activities and subsequent assessments. This research suggests that greater consideration of affective learning outcomes should be more explicitly considered to better achieve learning goals, and identifies experiential learning as a pedagogy that integrates the three domains of learning to facilitate the cognitive and affective development of students. In the first chapter, the relationship between attitudes and subsequent behaviors is explored from various theoretical perspectives in the context of environmental education. It is argued that greater attention to how attitudes are formed and shaped, as well as characteristics of attitudes that influence how resistant to change they are, is necessary to achieve broader goals of affective development. Direct experiences as they relate to the development, accessibility, stability, and strength of attitudes are identified as a significant factor, with important implications for affective learning in higher education. The second chapter explores the influence of experience across the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains of learning and presents various approaches for incorporating experiential learning into college and university curricula. Two course models at Michigan State University (MSU) that employ experiential learning pedagogies are described in detail, as well as the benefits and constraints of each model, and concludes with a discussion of barriers to implementing experiential learning pedagogies into college and university curricula more broadly. The third chapter links theory and practice to explore how various dimensions of environmental attitudes are influenced as an outcome of experiential learning in both MSU courses. Connectedness to nature, which measures the cognitive, affective, and experiential components of an individual's relationship with nature, is identified as a relevant construct to assess affective development in the context of learning goals for both courses. Experiential learning was demonstrated to significantly increase overall nature relatedness, as well as the affective and cognitive aspects of students' connectedness to nature as an outcome of learning in both MSU courses. The experiential dimension of connectedness to nature was not influenced by course participation, and may be a relic of students' past experiences in and with nature that contributed to their choice of major. Results indicate that experiential learning to increase students' connectedness to nature may be more impactful for students in other disciplines, those with lower initial nature relatedness scores, or individuals with less previous experience in nature. These results suggest that affective learning outcomes can be achieved when they are explicitly considered in course and curriculum design, and provides evidence in support of experiential learning as a useful pedagogy for the affective development of undergraduate students. The final chapter of this dissertation shifts focus from affective learning gains to cognitive ones to assess whether learning outcomes are influenced by order of instruction in an experiential learning activity. Results indicate that order of instruction does not influence how well students learn course material when experiential pedagogies are employed. The significance of experiential learning on affective and cognitive learning outcomes in higher education to better achieve learning goals warrants further consideration.
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