COMPARISON OF PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SCHOOL STUDENTS’ ATTITUDE AND KNOWLEDGE TOWARDS ENVIRONMENT WITHIN 4+4+4 SYSTEM

Abstract

The main reason of environmental pollution is human activity. Thus, individuals, firms, country governors who comprise the society are very important to have environment knowledge and sensibility. Therefore, it is believed that it is necessary to build environment knowledge and sensibility to children, who are the adults of future, in school and at home. The purpose of the paper is to evaluate primary, secondary, and high school students’ attitude and knowledge about environment and to make comparisons for categories of gender, age, type of school (private and public), and degree (primary, secondary, and high school). A survey about student’s attitude and knowledge towards environment is applied on 405 randomly selected children from Adana. The survey consists of demographic questions and the environmental attitude and knowledge scale. Reliability and consistency of the scale is verified with Cronbach’s alpha coefficient and exploratory factor analysis. Factor analysis reveals that the environmental attitude and knowledge scale has six components. For each of the six components, the differences between private and public schools, male and female students, age groups, and primary, secondary, and high school students are tested with t and ANOVA tests.