Attitudinal pro-environmental assessment: A global analysis in primary, secondary and tertiary education students

Abstract

The aim of the present study was to analyze and understand the way in which as-sessment both cognitive and affective elements (contextual and personal) condition the behavior of primary, secondary and tertiary education students with their environment. The guiding questions were: What is the assessment that students of different levels of education give to environmental issues? Is there any difference in the assessment of students between the contamination and the preservation scope within environmental variables? The environmental scale of attitudes by Moreno et al., (2005) was applied to 367 students for the attitudinal analysis. An adequate internal consistency of the Scale, α Cronbach = 0,776 was confirmed. It was detected that the greatest differences occurred in the attitudinal variables corresponding to the personal framework and the smallest differences occurred in the variables of the contextual scope. The results were relevant because they indicated that the variables belonging to the contextual scope are the ones that must be reinforced which can be materialized by strengthening the Curriculum through the emphasis in environmental education. The highest assessment of the environmental variables occurred differentially in students of tertiary, secondary and primary education respectively. The same tendency was observed in the attitudinal variables, detecting in its interior that the contextual scope obtained the lowest assessment in the three educational levels.