A Study on the Environmental Attitudes of Candidate Teachers

Year 2014, Volume: 4 Issue: 1, 275 - 284, 30.06.2014

Elvan Yalçınkaya Abdullah Karataş Mustafa Talas

Abstract

This research aims to identify the environmental attitudes of fourth grade students of Niğde University Primary School Teaching, Science Teaching and Social Studies Teaching departments. For this purpose, the New Environmental Paradigm Scale was applied to 231 students of related departments. The parts of the scale are intended to assess the nature and human based attitudes of the candidate teachers. According to the finds it was confirmed that the nature based attitude levels of the candidate teachers are higher than their human based attitude levels. But the fact that the human based and nature based attitudes of the candidate teachers don’t differ according to whether they took an environmental education course or not make it necessary to question the quality of the environmental education course provided by the Faculty of Education. As a consequence, inducing candidate teachers into a positive environmental attitude is regarded as necessary through applied and theoretically effective environmental education.

Keywords

Environmental attitude, environment education, candidate teachers

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