Abstract:

As the environmental issues grow, it has become necessary to search, and determine environmental issues, and develop an awareness that could possibly address such issues. Using traditional learning methods has no or very little impact on developing a sustainable environmental awareness. Therefore, in order to develop environmental awareness in children, it becomes essential to use new learning approaches such as social learning theory instead of the traditional ones. Observational learning is a learning method in which children learn by observing the objects around themselves. Using the social learning, the purpose of this study is to develop an instrument that can measure how children perceive the kinds of behaviors that adults display related to environmental issues. In order to achive the goal, local and foreign literature were reviewed, and an instrument, lenght of 20 items, was developed, called “Observing adults’-displayed-behavior related to environment scale”. The study sample was consisted of 275 primary and middle students located in Amasya, Turkey. The data was analyzed using exploratory factor analysis, and the findings suggested that the instrument was unidimensional. The reliability coefficient of the scale (Chronbach Alpha) was calculted as 0.80. Thus, it can be concluded that the developed instrument has validity and reliability evidence justifying the use of the instrument.    

Keywords: