PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS’ ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS AND KNOWLEDGE LEVEL IN CONNECTION WITH SOLID WASTE POLLUTION

Dr.Mehmet Cici, Dr. Nurettin Şahin
Dr. Hasan Şeker, Dr. İzzet Görgen,
Dr. Sabahattin Deniz
Muğla University

Abstract

The objective of environmental education is to cultivate a healthy relationship between human being and natural world in the cognitive level so that the outcome should be to produce attitude and behaviour not harmful to himself and nature. Environmental knowledge transfer should include rich example material and background knowledge with theoretical dimension for environmental education. The aim of this study is to identify the pre-service teachers’ environmental awareness and to find out their environmental knowledge level. For this purpose a Likert type environmental awareness scale containing 13-items based on responses of 216 participants that developed by researchers was used. The scale consists of four dimensions and also measures the knowledge level of participants concerning the solid waste pollution.

The results indicated that pre-service teachers have medium level environmental awareness in the issues concerning the organic wastes and packaging, but generally fair in recycle and reduction of wastes. The percentile frequency (% f) data illustrated the presence of low level of environmental knowledge among the pre-service teachers. According to results obtained by using t-test there was found significant differences between gender and solid wastes reduce in the favour of females. One-way variance test results also showed that there were significant understanding differences against total score on scaled items between pre-service teacher’s scientific disciplines and their graduate programs. There were no significant differences with respect to scaled items between parents’ educational history and environmental awareness of pre-service teachers, but some differences were found between the residence and the awareness of environmental issues in the favour of residence as apartments.

Keywords

Pre-service teacher, environmental education, solid waste pollution, environmental consciousness, environmental awareness