Needs assessment and determining educational priorities of high school students in the environmental field and constant development

Subject Areas : environmental management

Hamide Hajhosseini ¹ , Seyyed Mohammad Shobeiri ² , Mehran Farajollahi ³

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Received: 2008-09-06 Accepted : 2008-12-09 Published : 2010-04-03

Keywords: Education, Environment, Sustainable development, Need assessment, Environment education,

Abstract :

Different studies demonstrate that informing the public and public contribution are the best and the most economical policy in order to prevent environmental destruction. But the question is that what kind of requirements people with different age groups actually have in this particular field. It means that the requirements of environmental education for different age groups should be defined clearly. The first step in this procedure is to find the necessities of education for different age groups. One effective method to categorize people of different ages is to consider their educational levels. This research project discusses the needs and the educational priorities of high school students in the field of environmental studies. Therefore, three hypotheses are being evaluated, which include: 1-      Informing the indicated group about the environmental issues will end to their sensitivity toward them, 2-      Current educational schedule of the field is adequate for the indicated group, and 3- Teaching the environmental issues in the high school level is more effective. To examine the theories, high school students of four random educational regions of Tehran were chosen to fill in a questionnaire. The number of these students was defined as %7.5 of all students of each educational region by the guidance of the professors. In this way 516 students were taken to fill questionnaire, which their distribution are 134 students from region 1, 206 students from region 4, 69 students from region 7 and 107 students from region 12. Besides, to determine the priorities of educating, thirty researchers, scholars and teachers were taken to be questioned too. This research can be categorized as an applied investigation, and according to the method of data collection, it can also be defined as a descriptive survey which is collected in a “survey research” and in a Cross Sectional way. The main instrument of data collection in this section is applying questionnaire and its validity is the face validity and content and its rationality is estimated with the means of Cronbach’s Alpha Method which is equal to 0.79. Moreover Delphi technique in this research is used to define the priorities of educational requirements of the students and the collected data has been analyzed through the SPSS14.0 software. In this study, the parameters of descriptive statistics such as population, percentage, mean value and standard deviation are used. The parameters of comprehensive statistics like Will Coxon test, chi-square test and Crammers’ V coefficient are also used to analyze the questionnaires and evaluate the theories. These conclusions are derived from this survey: The results of descriptive analyzing of the first theory shows that the high school students believe that the current method of educating environment is inefficient and there is a need of change. The conclusions of comprehensive analysis also indicate the aforesaid truth. Thus, regarding all the factors, the first hypothesis will be confirmed. The conclusions of the second descriptive analysis as well as the results of the comprehensive analysis of the second theory also declare that the current environmental education is not qualified enough and should be changed. In this way the second hypothesis tend to be failed and a change is required. By analyzing the ideas of students descriptively, it can be concluded that teaching environmental issues in the high school level is more effective. Besides, the results of the third hypothesis demonstrate that age has positive effects in awareness, sensitivity and concern about protecting the environment. Although this finding is not sufficient to prove the third theory, the effect of environmental trainings in the high school level will be the most if this idea remains proper in all the educational levels; and to sum up, the third hypothesis will be correct.