In many countries Environmental Education (EE) is an integral part of school practice and curricula (OECD 2009). Usually it is combined with targets such as the improvement of environmental knowledge and attitudes as well as the encouragement of environmentally responsible behaviour.
Since the 1970s until today education policy has made many attempts to foster not only the importance but also an appropriate instructional design of EE in schools. As an example for such efforts may stand a decision by the German KMK (Conference of the Ministers for the Art and Culture) in 1980 which aimed to increase the proportion of cross-curricular teaching and to pro-mote/emphasize the hands-on-approach within EE. A more recent example is the proposal of “Quality Criteria for ESD-Schools” which has been developed in the ENSI/UNESCO programme “School Development through Environmental Education” (SEED) (Mogensen/Mayer 2005). With regard to an improvement and effectiveness of EE, current publications especially accentuate the importance respectively potential of autonomy-supporting teaching actions, out-of-classroom learning activities, teacher-cooperation and cooperation of schools and school-external partners (Darner 2007; OECD 2009; Eilam/Trop 2011).
Two major findings of the EE research indicate a limited success of both EE and the interventions and efforts mentioned above. First, generally EE is only par-tially effective. In most cases it seems not to encourage environmentally con-scious behaviour. Second, one can state that education policy guidelines and recommendations often were not or only inadequately implemented. Appar-ently there is a connection between these two findings (Rickinson 2001).
School teachers normally point out, that not a lack of good will, but adverse conditions of school life respectively half-day schools, such as the material wealth of the curriculum or the rigid 45-minute-intervals of the timetable hin-der more appropriate and effective EE-programs. In the past decades German research literature mostly agreed with this reasoning. It was repeatedly stated that a concession of time and a more flexible organized timetable/school life should be considered as necessary preconditions of an elaborated EE-practice (Bolscho 1998).
An increased autonomy of schools and the expansion of all-day schools in Ger-many provide various opportunities for an expansion and improvement of EE. However, until now very little is known about whether and under what condi-tions these opportunities are actually being used or not.
Within our research project “Environmental Education in half- and full-day-schools” it is investigated, if the mentioned changes on the level of school system are associated with changes on the level of pedagogical practice in the field of EE. The following research questions are crucial:

1. To which extend schools in general offer activities in EE? What are the considerable differences between schools that offer either a large or small number of EE-activities?
2. What kinds of instructional arrangements of EE can be found? Is it possi-ble to identify instructional arrangements that can be described as char-acteristics of half- vs. all-day schools or primary vs. secondary schools?
3. In what extent schools use their partial autonomy and/or the opportunities of all-day schooling to develop an ecological school-profile?

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