Pre-service Teachers’ Views on the Environmental Education, Human Brain and Genetics, Health and Sexual Education

Abstract

The main aim of this study is to present pre-service teachers’ views on the ecology and environmental education, human brain and genetics, health and sexual education. The presented paper in here is a follow-up study of European Commission supported project titled Biohead-Citizen which included 26 partners. The Biohead-Citizen project aims to understand how Biology, Health and Environmental Education can promote a better citizenship, including their affective and social dimensions, analyzing possible differences in 26 countries and associating them to controlled parameters, (e.g. social context, religion, gender). The questionnaire developed in the context of Biohead-Citizen project was used as main data collection tool in the study. A pilot study was conducted for reliability issues, implementing the questionnaire to 133 pre-service science teachers. The final version of translated questionnaire was administered to the 210 pre-service teachers who are at the last grade of their education at the faculty of education in Turkey. The findings of this study showed that pre-service teachers particularly give importance to items in the health and sexual education: “families should be responsible for the health education”; “the health education at the school improves students’ behavior”, “schools have to take into account public health policies”. Regarding human brain and genetics, the participants quite agree that “women can be as intelligent as men”; “identical twins have identical immune responses to transplants from one other person” and they strongly disagree that “ethnics groups are genetically different and that is why some are superior to others”. They also indicated their ecology and environmental education views and most of them strongly agree that “we must aside to protect endangered species”, “the main goal of environmental education in school should be developing behavior that is respectful”. In the study, there are no significant differences in the mean scores for males and females, and according to the participants’ childhood living place, father-mother education level, and their branches. The further findings and conclusions are presented with literature reviews.