An Evaluation of Elementary Teacher Candidates’ Environmental Approaches, Environmental Risk Perceptions and Environmental Behaviours

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to determine elementary teacher candidates’ environmental approaches (environmental-based or human-based), environmental risk perceptions and environmental behaviours. Furthermore this research intend to determine if there is a significant difference in elementary teacher candidates’ environment-centered or human-centered approaches, environmental risk perceptions and environmental behaviours according to the variables of gender and class, or not. The research was carried out with a total of 243 teacher candidates (131male and 112 female) from Elementary Department of Faculty of Education at Siirt University in Turkey. It was used the “New Environmental Paradigms Scale”, which was first time developed by Dunlap and Van Liere (1978) and revised by Dunlap et.al. (2000) and adapted into Turkish by Furman (1998), to determine the environmental approaches of the teacher candidates, the “Environmental Risk Perceptions Scale”, which was developed by Slimak and Dietz (2006) and adapted into Turkish by Altunoğlu and Atav (2009), was used to determine the teacher candidates’ perceptions of environmental risk and it was used “Environmental Behaviour Scale”, which was developed by Uzun and Sağlam (2006), to determine their environmental behaviours. At the analysis of data; it was consulted from descriptive statistical techniques and Pearson Moment Correlation coefficient. In our research, it was calculated that the Cronbach alpha reliability coefficient of environmental approaches scale as .65, the scale of environmental risk perceptions as .93 and the scale of environmental behavior as .85. As a result of this research, it was found that the teachers candidates’ environmental-centered approach mean score (M=4.21) is higher than human-centered approach mean score (M=3.35). Moreover, it was found that there is a significant and positive relation between the elementary teacher candidates’ human-centered approaches, environmental risk perceptions (r= .41; p<0.01) and environmental behaviours (r= .20; p< 0.01).