Abstract:

Students encounter concepts of environmental education throughout their lives. These concepts are also influential on students' environmental awareness and sensitivity. Students who have sufficient knowledge about the environment fosters positive attitudes towards the environment. The purpose of this research is to put forth the cognitive understandings of preservice teachers who are studying in different departments of Education Faculty regarding “greenhouse effect", "ozone layer" and "acid rain" concepts in terms of variety variables. The descriptive methods based on quantitative research paradigms were used for this study. The research is applied in the spring semester of the academic year 2011-2012. With aim of determining the cognitive levels of university students about these concepts related to environmental were applied the measuring environmental instruments developed by Selvi (2007) utilizing from literature. The measurement instruments were applied to a total of 585 pre-service teachers in the departments of Science Education, Social Sciences Education, Mathematics Education and Classroom Teacher Education of Education Faculty, Recep Tayyip Erdogan University. T-test and one-way variance were used in data analyses. In addition to these to determine the direction of the difference were also used the Scheffe test from post-hoc tests. In a result of analysis, it was seen that the preservice teachers had some cognitive misconceptions regarding environmental concepts covered in this article. As a result, this research brought to light that preservice teachers thought as future’s teachers in different branches had not cognitive understanding on important environmental concepts on enough level. At the end of the research, it was proposed needed to structures will make more sense learnings in the teaching of environmental concepts.

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