Raising environmental awareness through local-based environmental education in STEM lessons

Abstract

Republic Act 9512 mandates the promotion of environmental awareness through and by integrating environmental education in both public and private schools. Seeing STEM education in new light that seeks in helping learners use the local environment as a vehicle for developing understanding various environmental issues. Providing adequate STEM and environmental education will make everyone appreciate their relationship with the environment which lead toenvironmental awareness and in developing a sustainable future. This study aimed to develop Local-Based Lessons on Environmental Education through integrationto STEM lessons to raise environmental awareness among grade 8 learners. The study employed Quasi-experimental qualitatively supported with two-group pre-test-post-test design to examine the effectiveness of the Developed Local-Based Lessons on Environmental Education. T-test analysis between post-test scores of the control and experimental groups revealed to be significantly different at t (75.108) = -17.595, p=0.000 with the experimental group (M=24.49,SD=4.98) scoring higher than control group (M=8.99, SD=3.20). Similar result was found between the two groups gain score at: control and experimental, t(56.207) = -19.408, p(0.000)<.05, two-tailed with the experimental group gaining score higher than the control group. This implies that the Developed Local-Based Lessons on Environmental Education integrated to STEM lessons has increased the environmental awareness of the learners.