The Effectiveness of Environmental Education on Environmentally‐ Sensitive Behaviors

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to measure the environmental knowledge and behaviors of university students who are subjected to environmental courses during their education and to check if there exists a relationship between those two variables namely, environmental knowledge and behavior. For this purpose, a questionnaire with two parts; part one, for the measurement of environmental knowledge and part two, for the measurement of environmental behaviors was applied to Gazi University, Vocational School of Health Services, Environmental Health Program students who are subjected to environmental courses during their training and to Ankara University, Faculty of Educational Sciences, Social Sciences Education students as a control group who are not given any environmental lecture. The interpretation of results indicated that there is no statistically important difference among students (t=0.652, p>0.05) in terms of environmental knowledge. However, environmental behaviors of ‘Environmental Health Program’ students differs (t=2.039, p< 0.05) from the ‘Social Science Education’ students. Students who had taken environmental lectures are found behaving more environmentally way (mean 1.300) than the others (mean 1.178). Additionally, it is found that gender did not differ significantly from each other in environmental knowledge (t=1.290, p>0.05) Therefore a specific importance should be given to ‘environmental education’ in schools to promote environmentally responsible individuals.