Assessing the knowledge and attitude of elementary school students towards environmental issues in Rawalpindi

Abstract

Educational institutions need to increase their efforts in the modern era of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) to educate their students for a sustainable future. Teachers and curriculum is the key ingredient to educate children and teenagers to be leaders of tomorrow in protecting the environment. This quantitative study was conducted to examine elementary school students' knowledge and attitudes towards environmental issues in Rawalpindi. The environment is directly and indirectly affected by humanity. The environment is getting polluted day by day due to which it becomes difficult to live in such a massive environment. To achieve this, there is a need to develop knowledge and attitudes in each individual. For this purpose, the population of the study consisted of all the public and private schools of the Rawalpindi. A hundred students of the ten schools, five public and five private schools of Rawalpindi, were taken as a sample for data collection. To check the attitudes of students' the questionnaire-based Relevance of Science Education (ROSE) Project was used to measure a student's attitudes and to measure the knowledge of students' self-made knowledge assessment test was used to collect the data from 7thgrade students'. The study examined the knowledge and attitude of elementary school students in public and private schools. The study also checked and compared students' knowledge and attitudes in public and private schools of Rawalpindi. Data was analyzed on SPSS software; Cross tabulation and chi-square were used to check students' knowledge. The Independent t-test was used to measure the attitudes of students. The results indicated no significant difference between government and private school students' knowledge and attitudes. Private school students' had slightly more knowledge than public school students but this difference was not significant. The public and private school students had a positive attitude towards environmental issues. Students owned environmental problems and were highly motivated to solve these problems. They were agreed to take action for the betterment of the future. As a result, sustainable development from elementary school to university necessitates a paradigm shift in our educational systems. Indeed, a sustainable way of life is impossible to achieve without a proper education system that teaches our youth how to integrate sustainability principles into their daily lives and work. Significant progress has been made in integrating environmental values into current curricula, developing new approaches and producing educational content for effective EE implementation in both programmes, since it was a government initiative to integrate environmental concepts into established curricula, devise different approaches and prepare training materials for ef Teacher teaching is therefore important in both Pakistani education systems to improve vital thinking skills and to react positively to the world about potential Pakistanis.