Investigation of Turkish Elementary School Students' Environmental Awareness

Abstract

This study aimed to examine the environmental awareness of Turkish primary school students in the context of some demographic variables. The study was carried out with the general survey method. An online questionnaire was used as a data collection tool due to the Covid 19 pandemic conditions during the study. The first part of this survey form included demographic questions about gender, grade, household income, mother's graduation, and father's graduation. The second part included the 5-Likert type 21-item Elementary School Environment Awareness Scale (ESEAS). The original ESAS developed by Yıldız Yılmaz and Mentiş Taş (2017) consists of 31 items. As a result of a pilot study, it was decided to exclude 14 items from the original scale. The exploratory factor analysis result revealed that the scale showed a structure with five sub-dimensions (ecocentric, nature responsibility, anthropocentric, environmental knowledge, and hedonistic). Two hundred sixty primary school students at the 2nd and 4th-grade levels participated in the study. The present study's results, which examined elementary school students' environmental awareness levels, showed that the null hypothesis was accepted in most scores related to scale factors. These results show that the students who participated in the study tended to have information about the environment and the factors that threatened the environment, to be sensitive to nature, and to be ready to sacrifice to solve environmental problems. The analysis results show that the participants agreed with the statements in ecocentric, nature responsibility, ecological knowledge, and hedonistic sub-dimensions. At the same time, they disagreed with the views of the anthropocentric sub-dimension. It was determined that there was a significant difference between the groups in the context of some demographic variables.