Middle School Students' Environmental Attitudes and Informal Reasoning Regarding an Environmental Socioscientific Issue

Abstract

The purpose of the current study is to reveal students’ environmental attitudes, their informal reasoning, and how their informal reasoning on a socioscientific issue changes depending on their environmental attitudes. The study participants were 104 eighth-grade students. A form consisting of a scenario and open-ended questions was used as data collection tools. During the analysis of the collected data, the descriptive analysis method and descriptive statistics were used. The findings revealed that the majority of the students had an anthropocentric attitude toward the socioscientific issue and largely presented rationalistic reasoning. Moreover, while the students with an anthropocentric attitude used rational reasoning more, students with an ecocentric attitude presented rationalistic, emotional, and rationalistic-emotional reasoning. Considering the findings of the current study, suggestions are made to develop students’ emotional reasoning as well as rational reasoning by means of training students to have an ecocentric attitude.