The Effects of Knowledge, Beliefs and Attitudes about Environment on Issue-Based Environmental Problem Solving in Middle Schools

중학생의 환경에 대한 지식, 신념, 태도가 쟁점 기반의 환경문제 해결력에 미치는 효과

This article investigated the effects of students' knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes about environment on environmental issue-based environmental problem solving in secondary school students. This article also investigated whether these factors are related to the environmental problem solving. Therefore, we first developed the test instruments to measure secondary school students' environmental knowledge, environmental beliefs, and environmental attitudes. Then, we developed the environmental issue-based teaching materials for secondary school students. The subjects participated in a environmental issue-based approach that consist of 3 lesson over an three weeks period. The results of this study presents that environmental knowledge and environmental beliefs are effective for the environmental problem solving in middle school environment class. First, secondary school students knew well ecological knowledge about environmental problem, and was entertaining most ecological beliefs. Second, secondary school students were having attitude which is most pro-environmental behaviors. Third, secondary school students are referring necessity of development partially about environment point at issue of country level. But, they were retaining situation of preservation about environment point at issue of area level. It's not easy to generalize these results because of many different variables, but the results suggests that teachers should make an effort to improve student's environmental problem solving ability applying environmental issue-based learning. And it's necessary to develop many kinds of environmental issues and teacher's instruction method to enrich problem solving ability in the process of environmental issue-based learning.