Secondary School Students' Awareness of Environmental Education Concepts

Humans have been living in an environment since its existence. Human approaches and attitudes towards the environment in which they live have changed over time. It is hoped the negative attitudes of humans towards nature, the environment and environmental problems will change in a positive way, due to increasing levels of awareness occurring through environmental education. The aim of this study is to measure secondary school students' level of awareness about environmental education concepts. A quantitative survey model is used in this study. The sample of the study was taken at several central secondary schools in the Sivas province for students in Grades 5 – 8. There are a total of 524 students in the study. The “Environmental education concepts awareness scale (CEKFO)”, developed by Otun, Artun, Temur & Tozlu (2017) consists of 22 items and is a data collection tool for this study. The IBM SPSS statistical 23 package program was used to analyze the data. The results were analyzed by means of arithmetic-mean, standard-deviation, Mann-Whitney U test and Kruskal-Wallis test. The data was evaluated with a significance level of 0.05. As a result of the research, it was concluded that secondary school students who participated in ths research had a high level of awareness about the concepts of environmental education overall. On the other hand, it was concluded that there was no significant difference in secondary school students‘ awareness of environmental education concepts compared to gender and family speech status variables on environmental issues. It was observed that there was a significant difference between variables such as class, mothers’ education, fathers’ education and family monthly income levels.