The viewpoints of primary education pre-service science teachers about the environment according to anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric approaches

Abstract

This study seeks an answer to the questions "What are the viewpoints of primary education pre-service science teachers about the environment; are these viewpoints differentiated according to certain variants?" At a university in the Black Sea Region of Turkey, an attempt was made to determine the viewpoints of pre-service science teachers at different levels about the environment by means of a 5 point Likert scale consisting of 24 items and holding the reliability coefficient of .85 (Cronbach alpha). In the analysis of the results obtained by using the SPSS 13.0 package, it was realized that pre-service teachers' viewpoints were close to approaches which were non-anthropocentric and that they differed considerably according to class level, their fathers' job and the kind of the high school they graduated from. Certain practices, which are devoted to pre-service teachers' developing positive viewpoints about the environment and transferring these to their students in the future, should be applied. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved