THE USE OF NEW ECOLOGICAL PARADIGM SCALE AMONG PRE-SERVICE PRIMARY TEACHERS: LIMITS AND POSSIBILITIES

Abstract

Assessment and measurement of attitudes towards environmental issues is an important task of environmental education and one of the ways of its evaluation, focused on the affective component of environmental literacy. A wide range of research tools and scales is used for the measurement of pro-environmental attitudes in quantitative way. The best known and most widely used both in the world and in the Czech Republic is the New Environmental Paradigm (Dunlap & Van Liere, 1978) or New ecological paradigm (Dunlap et al. 2000), which has been modified several times and was used to detect environmental attitudes among various demographic groups. One of these are teachers and pre-service teachers (student teachers), who bear the major responsibility for the attitudes of the pupils. It is, therefore important to be able to identify environmental attitudes of students and teachers to assess the impacts of environmental action in their previous life and during their studies at universities. In the paper, we describe the possibilities of verifying the new ecological paradigm scale among pre-service primary teachers from the Czech Republic. The primary objective is to determine what are the possibilities and limits of this research tool and its subscales. We focused on reliability and construct validity of the scale. Furthermore, we investigate what effects have selected socio-demographic variables (age, gender, type of study) on those attitudes. New ecological paradigm scale as a whole is useful to identify the attitudes of pre-service teachers (Cronbach's α = .79), but its individual subscales are not applicable by themselves. That is also confirmed by item analysis of the scale. We discuss the possible problems of the use of the scale among pre-service primary teachers. Keywords : environmental attitudes, environmental literacy, new ecological paradigm, pre-service teachers